Subject and purpose of work: The purpose of this article is to present the vision of ECLAC - Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and its contribution to the reflections on economic development. Materials and methods: This is an exploratory and descriptive study. The first part of the paper contemplates the emergence and evolution of ECLAC thinking during its more than sixty-five years of existence. The second deals with dependency theory, ending with the current thinking proposed by ECLAC. Results: It results in a brief analysis of the moment of the globalization of the economy as an exclusionary process in the history of capitalism, emphasizing the importance of the ECLAC thinking, reinvigorated nowadays. Conclusions: It is considered that the dependency theory has been the great contribution of ECLAC thinking, with the change of focus from a viewpoint only from the prism of the central countries, to an optic from the point of view of the peripheral countries.