Abstract
Author(s): Smith, DA; White, DR | Abstract: This article reports results from a quantitative network analysis of international commodity trade flows designed to measure the structure of the world economic system and to identify the roles that particular countries play in the global division of labor. It improves on previous network-analytic studies of the world-economy in two ways. First, by using a newly developed measure of regular equivalence, this operationalization of a nation's roles in the international system is methodologically superior to previous work. Second, we have built a dynamic aspect into the analysis by examining international trade networks at more than one point in time (1965, 1970, and 1980). This allows us to answer questions about change both in the overall structure of the world-economy and in the positions of particular countries in the system. Our findings generally conform to the theoretically expectations of the world-system perspective as well as qualitative descriptions of recent changes in the international division of labor. © 1992 The University of North Carolina Press.
Highlights
While the premise that the global system plays a crucial role in most types of social change is widely accepted, there is much less consensus on its
The five empirical components addressed by the various theories of international economic systems are: (1) the constituent economies of states that produce, distribute, consume, and exchange exports and imports; (2) links or directed pairwise flows between these economies/polities, and country level and international policies that regulate these flows; (3) the political-economic networks formed by these links or pairwise flows; (4) the positions occupied by constituent economies/polities in these networks; and (5) the structure of these networks as patterns of flows between positions
This article's more circumscribed goal is to work within the political economy of the world-system tradition and use the results of a network analysis of commodity trade flows to assess some middle-range propositions related to international trade
Summary
Part of the disparity may be due to statistical cutting points of the clustering algorithms (the problem being in the clustering, not the scaling results) that may be substantively artificial in separating some of the large westem economies and Japan from the core group in 1965, not in 1970 or 1980 Those countries that Snyder and Kick do claim to be semiperipheral are classified in that stratum in our analysis (with the exception of Jordan, which we place unambiguously in the periphery). Its more diversified industrial production and trade patterns explain why it fits into our semiperiphery - and this finding is consistent with qualitative efforts to delineate the semiperiphery (Chase-Dunn 1983; Wallerstein 1979) While these anomalies and the moderate correlation between GNP per capita reinforce the view that GNP per capita is not an adequate proxy for world-system status, the major blocks identified in the positional analysis should differ in terms of average level of GNP per capita.
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