A Note: If you haven't read The Hunger Games, parts of this post won't make much sense. Also, you should read The Hunger Games - they're quite good.
There are many interpretations and analogies one can pull from Suzanne Collins' rich chronicles of a young woman named Katniss Everdeen and her struggles in a dystopian United States (now called Panem) against its repressive government. However, one plausible metaphor throughout is that The Hunger Games actually serves as a sustained look at a left-wing set of ideas about the workings of the global economy known as dependency theory - a set of ideas which had tangible and significant policy implications for Global North-South relations in the 1970s.
Let us start with the basic concept of dependency theory: that the world is separated into three types of countries. The first are the "core" countries, the rich nations of the U.S. and Western Europe. The second are those in the semi-periphery, countries relatively better off than many, but still poor. The majority of nations in this understanding are those of the periphery, countries like a Bolivia or most anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In The Hunger Games there are fairly direct parallels: the Capitol represents the core, District 1 is semi-periphery and Districts such as Katniss' District 12 are the periphery.
The central argument of dependency theory holds that European colonialism fundamentally altered the economies of nations on the periphery to service the interests of the core - as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galleano put it in his now infamous book, The Open Veins of Latin America, "our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison." While aspects of this analysis were quite old, it became a formalized set of academic writings beginning in the mid-1960s and then popularized by figures including Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Norman Girvan.
For these and other authors, dependency is created by the core nations through a wide array of methods. Core nations, in this understanding, derived great wealth primarily from mining and agriculture conducted in peripheral nations - think of silver mines in Bolivia or the giant sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. In doing this, core countries transformed the entire economies of peripheral lands towards benefiting the core; the richest agricultural land was geared towards export crops rather than food, the wealth of gold and silver sent abroad rather than providing benefits domestically. Dependency theorists, especially the more sophisticated ones understood that Europeans did not do this alone - they took advantage of existing divisions in these societies and forged alliances with (or helped build up) local elites who benefited from the overall system. This allowed for some development in the periphery, but always one closely watched by the core (for example, by controlling access to advanced technologies).
The number and depth of parallels to Collins' description of the Districts is striking. In The Hunger Games each of the twelve district has a product which it produces for export to the Capitol, seeing little of the benefits at home. The district that Katniss Everdeen comes from, District 12, produces coal - yet at the beginning of the first novel she remarks that the district is "lucky if we get two or three hours of electricity a day." Similarly, Collins captures some of the nuances in the better dependency theory pieces differentiating social conditions within the "periphery." District 12 itself is broken into several areas, with two of the most important being the Seam (where Katniss is from and the poorest sector) and the Merchant section, which has some level of material prosperity and whose residents (such as the mayor) maintain a certain social distance from the rest of the population.
Furthermore, the Capitol's rules for the districts on issues such as hunting (which is forbidden) nicely fit into the broad model of dependency theory positing the core will take active steps to reduce the autonomy of the periphery (in the U.S. for example, many mining communities in the late 19th/early 20th century did not pay workers in regular dollars, but "company scrip" redeemable only at company owned stores).
Who knew a popular young adult series would be a leading educator in radical economic theories?