Word.ws English Dictionary

dependency theory

dependency theory noun: a set of ideas to explain the inequalities between developed countries and developing countries, originally conceived in the context of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, stressing the interdependence of those countries in a capitalist global economy.

Noun

dependency theory (countable and uncountable, plural dependency theories)

  1. A set of ideas to explain the inequalities between developed countries and developing countries, originally conceived in the context of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, stressing the interdependence of those countries in a capitalist global economy.
    • Dependency theory is a body of ideas about the role of developing countries within the global economic system, about the nature of development, and about patterns of unequal power. It dominated much Latin American social science (including the analysis of the region's international role) in the...2010, Mark Bevir, editor, Encyclopedia of Political Theory, A–E, SAGE, →ISBN, page 370
  2. A subfield of database theory which studies implication and optimization problems related to logical constraints.

Forms of dependency theory

pluraldependency theories

Words formed from dependency theory

  • dependency theorist

Questions about dependency theory

What does dependency theory mean?
Dependency theory means a set of ideas to explain the inequalities between developed countries and developing countries, originally conceived in the context of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, stressing the interdependence of those countries in a capitalist global economy.
What part of speech is dependency theory?
Dependency theory is a noun.
What is the plural of dependency theory?
The plural of dependency theory is dependency theories.

Words near dependency theory in the dictionary

  1. dependency injection
  2. dependency injections
  3. dependency inversion principle
  4. dependency ratio
  5. dependency ratios
  6. dependency theory
  7. dependent
  8. dependent clause
  9. dependent clauses
  10. dependent personality disorder
  11. dependent personality disordered

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dependency theory (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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