Unlike the happy world of "partners in development" envisioned by the Sovereignty at Bay school, the Dependencia school presents a conception of the world as a exploitive hierarchy. In this hierarchy, wealth and benefits are moving away from the base, which is occupied by the poor countries, and toward the center, which is occupied by the large multinational planners and decision makers.
Enabling the MNC to reap most of the benefits of its interaction with the nation-state are, according to Stephen Hymer, one of the most well-known proponents of the Dependencia school, the "two laws of development." These two laws are the Law of Increasing Firm Size and the Law of Uneven Development.
The Law of Increasing Firm Size, Hymer explains, describes the tendency, since the industrial revolution, for firms to increase in size "from the workshop to the factory to the national corporation to the multidivisional corporation and now to the multinational corporation." The Law of Uneven Development, he continues, "is the tendency of the international economy to produce poverty as well as wealth, underdevelopment as well as development." Together, these two economic tendencies would have the following consequences:
... a regime of North Atlantic Multinational Corporations would tend to produce a hierarchical division of labor between geographical regions corresponding to the vertical division of labor within the firm. It would tend to centralize high-level decision-making occupations in a few key cities in the advanced countries, surrounded by a number of regional sub-capitals, and confine the rest of the world to lower levels of activity and income, i.e., to the status of towns and villages in a new Imperial system. Income, status, authority, and consumption patterns would radiate out of these centers ... and the existing pattern of inequality and dependency would be perpetuated. The pattern would be complex, just as the structure of the corporation is complex, but the basic relationship between different countries would be one of superior and subordinate, head office and branch plant. 1
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