FEW economists have inspired so many radical intellectuals in the Third World as Andre Gunder Frank, a polymath who theorised dependency as the cause of underdevelopment. He saw underdevelopment not as a failure to progress towards prosperity but as a dynamic process whereby the rich world “underdevelops” weaker regions.

His impact was particularly felt in Latin America, where he spent much of his long career, usually spending only a few years or less in one country after another.

Andreas Frank was born in Berlin in 1929. When Hitler became Chancellor four years later, his father, a Jewish leftist, moved his family to Switzerland. The rest of Frank’s life was spent in exile; even his eventual return to Germany followed his escape from Pinochet’s tyranny in Chile, where he had collaborated in Salvador Allende’s socialist experiment.

In the US, where the family moved when he was 12, Frank took a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1957, with a thesis on Soviet agriculture. He said that he learnt much more from his part-time jobs — as a barman, railway labourer, school janitor, fruit-picker and much else — than from textbooks.

Short-term appointments at US universities extended his interest beyond conventional economics. His appointment to the University of Brasilia in 1963 was in anthropology, and in his later posts in a score of countries he crossed the boundaries between history, sociology, development studies and international relations.

After marrying the radical Chilean writer Marta Fuentes, and teaching in Mexico and Canada, Frank moved to Chile in 1968 to spend five years at the University of Santiago. He had already made his name with his essay The Development of Underdevelopment (1966), quickly followed by Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America.

Economic and political thought in Latin America was grappling with the relations between the colonial heritage and the global capitalist economy. Some saw the continent’s poverty as a feudal legacy, but Frank produced a coherent critique of the rich world’s impact as an exploiter of resources rather than an investor in development.

Pinochet’s 1973 coup, which killed or jailed many of Frank’s students, sent him back to Europe: first to Germany, then for five years to Norwich as Professor of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia. He left England in 1983, complaining of the country’s racist climate, to take up chair in Amsterdam, which became his permanent base.

There he nursed his wife Marta until her death in 1993. He resented his obligatory retirement at 65, and gladly took on visiting positions in Canada and the US — countries which had once declared him non grata as a notorious subversive — while continuing his prodigious output of books (more than 40) and articles (about 1,000) in the seven languages he mastered.

His last, and probably most important, book, ReOrient (1998), an overview of the emergence of the world economy during the past five centuries, attracted considerable acclaim.

After the death of his first wife, he married Nancy Howell. The marriage was dissolved after four years. In 2003 he married Alison Candela, who survives him, with two sons by his first wife.

Andre Gunder Frank, economist and social historian, was born on February 24, 1929. He died on April 23, 2005, aged 76.