by Emiliano López
Hegemonic economic theory, in both its neoclassical and developmentalist versions, built its object of study on the commodity form. As Marx aptly put it at the opening of Capital, the simplest thing, the lowest level of determination in capitalist society, is carried by the category of the commodity. This is how this form of organising social life appears before our eyes: as an “immense accumulation of commodities,” an exchange of things produced in order to be sold. In this sense, we can grasp what an economy produces, accumulates, and distributes only through exchange. But this, of course, is only the appearance.
GDP, growth rates, and even the UNDP’s Human Development Index measure success by the capacity to generate and circulate exchange-value, that is, the capacity to produce commodities that are actually sold and exchanged. Yet we can think of the development of a society as involving more fundamental questions, though also more elementary ones. Can this society reproduce itself sustainably? Can it guarantee that those who compose it, and the generations that follow, have the material conditions to exist, to develop in the fullest and most human sense of the term, and to consolidate themselves over time?
The question, first of all, is which measure matters, from a human standpoint, for the discussion of development. What is the concrete aim of developing the material productive forces of a society, if not to realise the realm of freedom in its full sense, something that plainly lies far from the bizarre constructions of every liberal way of posing the problem?
Alongside the reproduction of capital that Marx set out in Book II of Capital, a deeper sense of reproduction runs through his entire work: social metabolism, the Stoffwechsel between human society and the natural conditions of its own existence. For Marx, labour is precisely the mediation between humanity and nature, the activity by which a society transforms the world to satisfy its needs and, in doing so, reproduces itself. From this perspective, development is not the accumulation of value but the production of use-values: food, health, drinking water, housing, knowledge, habitat, transport, leisure, among others. It is evident that, in a society dominated by capital, capital manages to subordinate use-value to value: it subsumes social metabolism under the logic of exchange-value, turns into a commodity what could be a common good, and orients production toward the valorization of capital rather than toward the satisfaction of needs, despite the textbook neoclassical claims about what “economic science” is for. Measures and indicators built exclusively on growth inherit that logic of subordination. They count value and treat the reproduction of life as a by-product that, it is assumed, will trickle downward.
Marx left part of this undeveloped, and feminist political economy completed it from the 1970s onward: the labour that reproduces life day by day, unpaid and carried out overwhelmingly by women, is labour in the full sense, and in no case a natural backdrop to production. That correction is not a footnote here. It becomes one of the two halves through which the reproduction of life is actually measured. But the backbone of the argument precedes that debate: the reproduction of life is a problem of political economy in its own right, not a residue of growth, and a new theory of development has as its central foundation the analysis of a society’s good living conditions as a whole.
Yet a political economy from the Global South requires understanding our thoroughly unequal place within the dynamics of accumulation on a world scale. If, as Marini held, imperialism is not external to the dependent economy but constitutive of it, running through its structure, its State, and its social relations, then structural subordination is not only the extraction and flight of value, something that the Structural Dependency Index and the surplus accounts already register, as we have developed in this Substack. It is inscribed in the very capacity of a society to reproduce its material life. Dependency does not only extract surplus; it also limits reproduction. In work developed together with Maisa Bascuas and Pilar Troya Fernández, we have called that outcome peripheral structural sub-reproduction: not a deterioration relative to some prior adequacy, as in the “social reproduction crisis” diagnosed in the rich countries, but a constitutive insufficiency of the dependent insertion itself. Reproduction in the Global South was not undermined from a functioning baseline. History shaped it as sub-reproductive. There is no place to return to, nothing to restore, only conditions to be built for the first time.
One clarification forestalls a predictable misreading. Questioning the productivist bias of mainstream economics is not claiming that the Global South needs less development of its productive forces. Electricity, water, transport, connectivity, food are conditions for the reproduction of life, not concessions to a Manichean productivism. The argument questions the capitalist form under which development tends to occur in the periphery, oriented toward export enclaves and external valorisation rather than popular needs. The distinction between the sovereign development of the productive forces and dependent capitalist development underlies everything that follows.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
The instrument that measures this rests on a distinction that the feminist tradition put on the table, and it is worth stating clearly because it organises the whole discussion. The reproduction of life has two sides. On the one hand, the structural conditions of reproduction: the material resources, collective goods, and infrastructures that make the reproduction of life possible. Water systems, health provision, schools, energy, transport. On the other hand, the concrete labour of reproduction: the everyday activity through which those conditions become lives actually sustained, cooking, cleaning, caring for the sick and the child, holding together the networks that keep everything in place.
The work we have developed with the Dependency Lab tool makes it possible to measure both as two subindices. The first, the SRI-E, registers the structural conditions, the substrate built and provided by the State and by the community. The second, the SRI-T, registers the organisation of reproductive labour: its intensity and distribution by gender, measured directly through time-use surveys, the balance between what the State provides and what falls on the household, reproductive autonomy, and the care that migrates through global chains. The two are not separate items on a list; they are the two moments of a single circuit. Our central finding is that dependency does not strike one and spare the other: it compresses both.
What Dependency Destroys
Let us begin with the structural conditions. Their relation to dependency is strong and direct: across the panel of 67 countries, the two move in opposite directions, with a correlation of −0.63 that persists after controlling for income per capita. The higher a country stands in the hierarchy of dependency, the thinner the material substrate its people have for reproducing their lives. And it worsens as one descends the hierarchy: grouped by dependency, the structural-conditions score falls at every step, from 0.83 in the least dependent economies to 0.52 in the most dependent. The relationship never weakens.
Figure 1. Dependence compresses social reproduction indexes
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
This is the direct blow. Water systems were never built because they require sovereign investment that dependent insertion routinely blocks. Health and education provision eroded by the fiscal subordination imposed by external debt and monetary dependency. Energy and transport infrastructure oriented toward export enclaves rather than toward the neighbourhoods where the working class lives. Each is a channel through which the structural position translates into a degraded substrate for life, and together they constitute what we call “peripheral structural sub-reproduction”: not a dismantled welfare state, but a substrate that dependency prevented from ever being adequately built.
Figure 2. Dependence hits all the dimensions of structural reproduction conditions
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
The Second Compression
This is where a hasty reading could go wrong. One would expect that, if the structural substrate collapses, reproductive labour would act as a buffer: absorbing the shortfall and staying high, covering the gap. The data do not show that. Reproductive labour does not cushion the fall: it falls with it. The SRI-T correlates with dependency as strongly as the SRI-E, and all its dimensions, state provision, autonomy, care chains, and unpaid work, deteriorate as dependency rises.
The intensification of the burden on women does not appear, then, as an index that stays high, but as one that deepens with dependency. When there is no water system, someone walks kilometres to fetch it. When health care is scarce, someone tends the sick at home. When social spending shrinks, someone stretches an impossible budget by taking on one more job and a third unpaid shift. That someone is, overwhelmingly, a woman, and among women, disproportionately the poorest, the migrant, the racialised. Time-use surveys confirm this clearly: the more dependent a country, the wider the gap in unpaid work hours between women and men.
Figure 3. Dependence hits the unpaid feminised labour
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
Note: The direct evidence. In countries with time-use surveys, the gap in daily unpaid work hours between women and men grows with structural dependency (r = +0.29). India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Morocco, or Guatemala, all highly dependent, show gaps of four to five hours a day; Norway or Finland, less than one. The slope is a conservative estimate: the countries with the deepest gaps are precisely those with the fewest time-use surveys, so the real pattern is probably stronger than the one observed.
This is where the feminist economic argument reveals its full force for discussing the political economy of the Global South in general, not as a particular topic. Dependency plainly degrades reproductive labour; it is therefore not merely a crisis of care, but a structurally different and more severe level than what occurs in the centre, and it can be theorised through the crisis of the neoliberal State and the neoliberal turn.
Lower state provision of care, less reproductive autonomy, and a burden of unpaid work that grows heavier and more feminised constitute the very condition of existence of reproductive labour in the great majority of countries of the Global South. The dependent periphery subjects women to a double compression: a collapsed material substrate and an organisation of reproductive labour that sinks along with it.
The Mark on the World of Labour, Over Time
Time-use surveys are the most direct measure of the reproductive burden, but they are sporadic: each country runs one about once a decade, and many of our countries never run one at all. To see the dynamics over time, it helps to look at the inequalities in the world of labour that feed that burden and that do have a complete annual series. The most telling indicators are female vulnerable employment, the precarious own-account work and unpaid family work that absorb women when wage employment is scarce. It is the market counterpart of reproductive labour: the same structural insufficiency that offloads care onto the household pushes women toward the precarious edge of the labour market.
Figure 4. Higher dependency, more women are precarious in employment
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
Note: Female vulnerable employment rises sharply with structural dependency (r = +0.61): in the most dependent economies, the overwhelming majority of women who work do so in precarious or unpaid jobs. Unlike the wage gap, which the formal sector underestimates in the periphery, and the participation gap, distorted by subsistence work, female vulnerability is the labour indicator that most clearly traces the dependency gradient.
And it is not a snapshot but a persistent trait. Over thirty years, female vulnerability declines slowly everywhere, but the stratification by a country’s position in the global dynamics of accumulation does not shift. In the most dependent economies, more than half of women remain in vulnerable employment; in the least dependent, fewer than one in five. The distance in 1995 is practically the same as in 2024.
Figure 5. Female precarization persistence, 1995-2024.
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
The labour-participation gap tells a more nuanced story, which is why it is worth showing. It falls in every region, but it stays high precisely where care has not been socialised, in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, while in Sub-Saharan Africa it is low not out of equality but because subsistence participation pushes women into a double shift of agricultural and domestic labour. The relation to dependency is not linear; regional heterogeneity is part of the finding.
Figure 6. The participation gap falls but with high persistence of unpaid female labour
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
These labour inequalities feed the reproductive burden, as measured. Among countries with time-use surveys, the labour-participation gap predicts the gap in hours of unpaid work (correlation 0.80) and female vulnerable employment (correlation 0.43). The world of labour and reproductive labour are two sides of a single social organisation of care under dependency.
Figure 7. Labour force-market inequalities feed the reproductive burden
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
Against What We Measure
All of the above measure a distance, and it is worth pausing on what is being measured, because the meaning of the argument depends on which comparison we take to be correct. As we have argued, the Global South is largely in a condition of sub-reproduction. This obliges us to ask: below what? The choice is not technical but theoretical and political, and three usual candidates, from our perspective, fail.
The first is the world average of reproduction conditions. This would be merely descriptive and tells us nothing about which conditions are desirable. Moreover, it is obviously influenced by the very periphery one wishes to evaluate and is therefore dragged downward. The second is the threshold offered by the central countries: it reintroduces the single ladder of development, the North as destination, which dependency theory and the whole political economy of the Global South spent fifty years dismantling. And the third, the rights floor developed by the British economist Kate Raworth through the doughnut, or the one proposed by the United Nations through the Sustainable Development Goals, defines a minimum below which no one should fall, but that minimum is stipulated without considering the capabilities and the development of the productive forces.
Let us dwell on the third, the most serious. Kate Raworth’s doughnut is right to shift the goal from GDP toward the satisfaction of needs within planetary limits, but it is worth specifying what it is: a visual monitor of a goal and a change of mindset, not a theory of social relations. It fixes a floor taken from rights and the Sustainable Development Goals, and measures who falls below it, but it does not explain what produces that shortfall. Its answer to maldistribution is the redesign of organizations, as if insufficiency were a problem of design and not the result of a determinate social relation. It is the form of reasoning that Marx subjected to critique in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: the distribution of the means of consumption is not an autonomous moment that can be corrected on its own, but a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production. And here lies the underlying point: the productive forces that today would make it possible to reproduce everyone’s life are a social product, accumulated by the labour of generations, but under the dynamics of capital those forces and the use-values they generate are appropriated privately and subordinated to valorization. The reproduction deficit therefore does not express a scarcity, but the way in which a wealth produced socially and appropriated privately is distributed; in the Global South, that appropriation adds the drainage of surplus toward the centre. A threshold that measures the distance to possible life, without naming that appropriation, registers the result and omits its cause.
That threshold has, following Marx, a double character. The physical component of reproduction is invariable and universal: water, calories, basic health care. For it there is no discretion here: the threshold is universal satisfaction, and the deficit is the proportion of the population excluded from a vital need. The historical and moral component, by contrast, is not a fixed minimum. Marx left it deliberately open, because its level is determined not by nature but by the degree of development attained and the balance of forces between the classes: a dignified life in this century includes schooling, connectivity, a life expectancy that were not needs a century ago, not because capital granted them, but because the development of the productive forces made them possible and social struggle inscribed them as owed. For that component, then, the measure cannot be an eternal absolute nor the level of the North, but the historically possible: that which the productive forces, socially built, allow to be reproduced. If those living conditions are already capable of being reproduced and are nonetheless not achieved, the reason is not a natural scarcity, because what is needed to produce them already exists. What the distance measures, then, is how the wealth that society produces collectively is appropriated privately instead of becoming the reproduction of life.
To define the threshold in this way is not a technical operation but the beginning of a dispute. If the level of the historical and moral component is fixed by the balance of forces between the classes, then to measure reproduction against what social labour already makes possible, and not against a minimum of survival, is already to take a side in that balance of forces. It is to affirm that this life is the guiding principle of a dispute, and to name the distance that separates existing society from the one that would be capable of guaranteeing it. That is why discussing a new development project, grounded in a New Theory of Development from the Global South, cannot be reduced to a policy adjustment within the given order. It is necessarily the dispute for another society, one that subordinates production to the reproduction of life and not life to the accumulation of capital. The threshold, then, does not only measure a deficit: it points to the content of a necessary social transformation.
Figure 8. The physical core of reproduction
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
Note: The gap ceases to be an index number once it is brought down to the physical core of reproduction. For four vital needs, safely managed drinking water, food, basic health, and electricity, the distance between what each country attains and the frontier of the already possible (the best level any country reaches today) translates into people: in India, 105 million without drinking water, 129 million undernourished, 57 million without electricity, and some 759,000 deaths of children under five per year that would not occur at the frontier; in Nigeria, 53, 25, and 93 million, and 833,000 avoidable child deaths per year; in Mozambique, 13, 8, and 21 million, and 77,000. In water, food, and electricity, each figure is a stock of people deprived today of a use-value; in mortality, a flow: lives lost each year that would not be lost against the ceiling another country already touches.
How to Explain the Structural Sub-reproduction of the Global South?
That a dependent country ends up far from that frontier of reproduction admits two explanations that lead to opposite conclusions. The first naturalises the shortfall and holds, in essence, that the country is poor, and the deficit follows from poverty. The second understands this shortfall as the result of a relation: the country produces enough, but that product is subtracted from it. The first case may apply to several countries, but given the natural and productive conditions of much of the Global South, the second conclusion is more compelling, since it lets us compare countries with equivalent resources.
The first candidate is income. If we compare only countries of equivalent income, the correlation falls from +0.67 to +0.20. That is: much of the reproduction deficit is explained because dependent countries are, quite simply, poorer. One might conclude that the problem is poverty, not dependency. But that conclusion inverts the order of things. The poverty of the Global South is not a starting point but a result: income is depressed because dependency drains, year after year, the surplus that would allow capital to accumulate and grow. That low income is, in large measure, what remained after the North and the local bourgeoisies appropriated the wealth produced and directed it toward superfluous consumption and financial investment. To compare “at equal income,” then, is to compare countries after subtracting precisely what dependency takes from them. That is why the effect almost vanishes: not because dependency does not matter, but because, in equalising incomes, we have already discounted its principal imprint.
Figure 9. Correlations between dependency and social reproduction controlled by income and surplus
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
The pertinent category is not income but the surplus an economy actually generates, before it is drained. When the correlation is recalculated comparing countries that generate an equivalent surplus, the effect of dependency does not vanish as it did when incomes were equalised, but reappears as a structural relation. Income conceals the imprint of dependency, because depressed income is already its result; surplus lets it be seen. At equal surplus generated, the dependent country reproduces less life, not more. As we have already worked through in this Substack, the periphery does not lack surplus: it produces it in abundance, based on a very high rate of exploitation of its working class, extracting more surplus labour per unit of paid labour than the centres. This surplus is drained abroad and oriented toward the short-term valorisation of capital. It is generated in social labour and does not return as the reproduction of life. It articulates the two traditions that sustain this framework: the surplus is constituted by intensifying labour exploitation, and it is lost through drainage and misorientation, as Baran showed, instead of reproducing life.
Figure 10. Correlations between dependency, rate of surplus value and social reproduction conditions
Sources: Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights.
This inverts the usual question. It is not a matter of explaining why the Global South is too poor to reproduce life, but why it does not do so despite being able to. The answer lies not in an incapacity of the periphery, but in a structure that subtracts the surplus before it can become reproduced life, that is, a better life.
Breaking the Circuit
Bringing the two sides of the coin together, the mechanism is laid bare. Dependency compresses at once the structural conditions of reproduction and the organisation of the labour that sustains it, and because much of that labour is invisible to conventional accounting, it never enters the development policies that keep reproducing dependency. The compression of the material substrate and the intensification of the feminised burden are one and the same mechanism seen through two prisms, which is why we must analyse them together.
But a mechanism is not a destiny, and naming it precisely is the condition for intervening in it. If dependency deforms the reproduction of life by subordinating it to the external valorisation of capital and the class logics that emerge from it, then reversing that deformation is not a matter of more growth or of better compensatory social policies within the same circuit. It requires what the tradition of the political economy of the Global South, since Amin, has called delinking: subordinating external insertion to an internal logic of development, and that internal logic, if it is to mean anything, has as its measure the reproduction of life, not accumulation. To build sovereignly the conditions that dependency prevented- water systems, health, energy, and the capacity for innovation- and at the same time to decommodify and socialise the care labour that today falls unpaid on women, is the concrete content of a non-hegemonic autonomy. This is the recovery of the faculty to orient social metabolism toward popular needs.
And that turn has in the working classes not only the key subject that can dispute the orientation of development policies, because it corresponds to their needs of life, but also the backbone of political coalitions that make it possible to rethink the horizon of the possible so as to prioritise life over capital.
Development, therefore, is not exhausted in better distributing a given burden of productive and reproductive labour, but in expanding the structural conditions themselves and easing the burden at the same time: more water, more health, more energy, more collectively provided care, placed at the service of a better life. A theory of development that begins from the reproduction of life does not treat subjects as victims to be compensated, but as the starting point from which transformation is thought.
Toward a New Theory of Development
With this note, one of the frameworks the series has traced is complete. The Structural Dependency Index located each country in the global hierarchy; the State’s Mediating Capacity measured its margin of action with respect to that position; the Social Reproduction Outcomes ask what all of that produces in the lives it is supposed to sustain. They are three questions of a single problem and, only when read together, do they make visible what, separately, remains in shadow: that dependency is decided, in the last instance, in a society’s capacity to produce the life of its people. Development, measured in this way, is not what an economy piles up, but the life it manages to produce, and for whom.
These three instruments are the first strokes of a larger task: to build a new theory of development from the Global South. A theory that neither imports its categories from the canon of the North nor measures progress under the threshold of accumulation, but starts from the reproduction of life as its criterion and from the dependent position as its analytical point of departure for understanding the polarisation that globalised capitalism produces. Against a thinking of development that for decades promised convergence and delivered only subordination, the task is to reconstruct political economy from our own condition. To name the mechanisms that produce us as dependent countries, to measure what is extracted from us, and, on that basis, to dispute a project in which the production of life ceases to be the exception and becomes the measure of development.
Emiliano López is a researcher at CONICET–Universidad Nacional de La Plata and Chief Economist at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
All the data that we used in this article is based on Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights
Methodological note
The social-reproduction indicators are organised into two subindices. The structural conditions (SRI-E) average four dimensions: health and survival, reproductive infrastructure, public provision, and ecological commons. Reproductive labour (SRI-T) averages the intensity and distribution of unpaid work, measured by gender gaps in time-use surveys, state and market provision of care services, reproductive autonomy, and global care chains. The variables are normalised over the full panel, and the correlations with the Structural Dependency Index (−0.63 for the SRI-E and −0.67 for the SRI-T) persist after controlling for income per capita. All data come from the Dependency Lab, powered by Global South Insights, and are reproducible on the open platform.