Abstract
World-systems sociologists have long recognized a three-tier structure in the world-economy, which comprises peripheral, semi-peripheral, and core groups of countries. This paper introduces a new database tool for analyzing this structure of the world-economy in terms of national income, the Structure of the World-Economy (SWE) analytical tool. It can be used to chart the structure of the world-economy in terms of income per capita for any year from 1960-2000 based on parameters selected by the user. Results confirm the existence of a three-tier structure of the world-economy that is relatively stable over the period for which data are available. A continuous set of benchmarks for the boundary points separating zones of the world-economy are reported for the period 19752002, along with a brief analysis of national mobility across those boundaries. Only seventeen countries (out of 103) made lasting transitions between zones of the world-economy over the study period, mostly due to changes in the prices of natural resources. The results of this study suggest that development policy formation should focus more on the attainable goal of transitioning countries from the periphery to the semiperiphery of the world-economy, and less on achieving an absolute standard of developed or core country status.
Highlights
World-systems sociologists have long recognized a three-tier structure in the worldeconomy, which comprises peripheral, semiperipheral, and core groups of countries
Following the ADKM precedent, the results reported in this paper use the gross national product (GNP)/FX operationalization for national income, though all six possible combinations are available in the Structure of the World-Economy (SWE) tool
An option has been hard-coded, to allow users to exclude China. (Advanced users can modify the tool to exclude any countries they choose by modifying the “NOLARGE” field on the Series Lookup page.) China and India each represent a substantial proportion of total world population, and any movement by China or India across zones of the world-economy would obliterate the resolution of the boundary between zones
Summary
On the location of the semiperiphery, Arrighi and Drangel (1986) take Wallerstein to task for inconsistent, vague, and even contradictory depictions (pp. 13–14). They suggest that: As a matter of fact, the list includes all states that seem to occupy an intermediate position in the world-economy from the point of view of either their income levels or their power in the interstate system. The merchant city-states that Chase-Dunn and Hall identify as semiperipheral in their power-based typology would, in the context of this paper, be classified as part of the core of the world-economy on account of their high income levels. In a second group of studies, countries have been clustered by income level (Arrighi and Drangel 1986; Korzeniewicz and Martin 1994) Studies in both traditions consistently uncover a three-zone partition of the world-economy. My own operationalization of the structure of the world-economy, developed in the context of the income tradition, will be presented
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