Bio: (1931-2018) Egyptian economist. Samir Amin studied political science, statistics, and economics in Paris, and at that time he was close to the Socialist Party and the Maoists. In 1957, he received his doctorate on the structural causes of the underdevelopment of the so-called underdeveloped countries. This made him one of the first and most important proponents of dependency theory. He later worked and taught at the universities of Bamako, Dakar, and Paris. Amin has published over 30 books on dependency, African countries and their economies, neocolonialism in Africa, Eurocentrism, imperialism, and global capitalism.

In Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (1970), Amin argues that the underdevelopment of poor countries is a direct consequence of the way that the capitalist economy works. The exploitation of poor countries by rich countries enables the former to give higher wages to their workers, while at the same time reducing the prices of goods for consumers, thus eliminating the problem of insufficient demand.

The dominance of foreign capital in underdeveloped countries leads to a complete redirection of exports from those countries and the destruction of the tertiary sector in them. This dynamics of relations leads to an increase in the debt of peripheral countries, which makes them dependent on the countries of the center, whose debtors they are. Multinational corporations organize world trade, and the negative consequences of such trade (destruction of small peasants, impoverishment of workers, environmental destruction, abolition of human rights) affect underdeveloped countries significantly more. Structural differences between developed and underdeveloped countries (developed countries have greater political and economic power, and developed countries are the ones from which the largest multinational corporations come) prevent underdeveloped countries from taking advantage of their comparative advantages over developed countries within the global economy.

In the last twenty years of his life, Amin has mostly studied American imperialism and American hegemony, in the books Obsolescent Capitalism (2003) and Beyond US Hegemony (2006). Amin believes that the American imperialist project is based on the monopolies that the United States has in the fields of technology, finance, natural resources, media, and weapons production.

Main works

Les effets structurels de l’intégration internationale des économies précapitalistes: Une étude théorique du mécanisme qui a engendré les éonomies dites sous-développées (1957);

Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (1970);

La crise de l‘impérialisme (1975);

Class and Nation: Historically and in the Current Crisis (1979);

Dynamics of Global Crisis (1982);

Transforming the World-Economy?: Nine Critical Essays on the New International Economic Order (1984);

Eurocentrism (1988);

Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (1997);

Obsolescent Capitalism (2003);

Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World (2006); 

Global History: A View from the South (2010);

The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism (2013); 

Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx's Law of Value (2018).