A new "developmentalist" orthodoxy pointed the means by which such economies were meant to close the gap with the advanced industrial nations. It held that capitalist market mechanisms could not achieve that goal. As the staff of the World Bank later recalled of "the dominant paradigm at that time":
It was assumed that in the early stages of development markets could not be relied upon, and that the state would be able to direct the development process . . . The success of state planning in achieving industrialisation in the Soviet Union (for so it was perceived) greatly influenced policy makers. The major development institutions (including the World Bank) supported these views with various degrees of enthusiasm.58
Just as Keynesianism was dominant within bourgeois economics in the advanced countries at the time, so statist, "import substitutionist", doctrines were hegemonic when it came to the Third World. The main proponent of these in the 1940s and 1950s was the very influential United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, directed by the Argentinian economist Raoul Prebisch. It argued that development could only take place if the state intervened to block imports to foster the growth of new local industries,59 since otherwise "dependence" on the advanced capitalist economies would prevent industrialisation. "60
More radical versions of such "dependency theory" dominated much of the left worldwide in the 1960s. The writings of Paul Baran (especially The Political Economy of Growth) and Andre Gunder Frank (who talked of the "the development of underdevelopment" )61 dominated most Marxist thinking on the subject (even though Gunder Frank did not see himself as Marxist).62
Baran wrote that:
Far from serving as an engine of economic expansion, of technological progress and social change, the capitalist order in these countries has represented a framework for economic stagnation, for archaic technology and for social backwardness.63
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