Core-periphery Relations Research Articles

Mobility, contact, and exchange in the Baltic Sea basin 6000–2000 BC

My intention in this paper is to outline the main features and principal aspects of contact and exchange among the later prehistoric hunter–gatherers (late Mesolithic and post-Mesolithic) in the Baltic Sea basin, which covers the southern and eastern reaches of Northern Europe, and to summarise the main advances in current research. The area broadly covered includes the Baltic Sea basin that has provided effective routes for communication between the coastal regions surrounding the Baltic Sea, central Baltic islands, and regions further away in the north European Plain, inland regions of Fennoscandia and Russia that could be reached by an extensive network of major rivers and lakes. Effective transport for negotiating these routes both in the summer and winter existed already from the early Mesolithic. Goods moved along these routes included a wide range of artefacts discussed in the paper. Geographically, exchange was organised at three levels: regionally, inter-regionally, and over long distances. Each mode of exchange was probably organised along different lines socially, and each served to implement wide-ranging social strategies for the general purposes of social reproduction, mate exchange and biological reproduction, as well as the spread of innovations. In the concluding section, I discuss the nature of contacts and consequences of exchanges between the early farming communities and the hunter–gathering groups within the framework of the core-periphery relations.

Cultural education and the canon: A comparative analysis of the content of secondary school exams for music and art in England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, 1990–2004

Discussions about the cultural canon in the educational system relate to the debates on globalisation, the multicultural society, and the maintenance and protection of countries’ own national culture and language. In addition to cultural differences in the history of nations, it is assumed that two formal sociological characteristics—a country's size and centrality in terms of core-periphery relations—also contribute to a better understanding of the relation between culture, canon, and nationality: Large countries behave differently from small countries in the provision of education in art and music, in particular with respect to the cultural canon. The question papers on art and music of the secondary school exams in England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands were analysed over a period of 15 years (1990–2004). The presence of a cultural canon can be interpreted as the extent to which in the exam papers emphasis is put on the country's own culture or the culture of others, on the past or on the present, on high or popular culture. Content analysis of the papers showed that Germany, France, and England give the most attention to their own culture, to the culture of the past, and to high culture. Germany and France do this to a greater extent than England. The Netherlands deviates in all three respects. Unlike large countries with a strong cultural past and a dominant position in transnational cultural relations, a small country is inclined to watch and to follow the cultural centers in the world, and to emphasize and to join what is new instead of nourishing its own cultural past. National cultural values and repertoires, the cultural canon included, may be fruitfully understood as demonstrations of a core-periphery structure governing the transnational cultural exchange.

'CARICOM - 'Friends of All, Satellites of None' - Reconfiguring the Heterarchy-Hierarchy Continuum'

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has been pursuing both political and economic integration since its inception in 1973. While pursuing integration within the region, the entity has also been pursuing an extra-regional relationship with the United States of America.Three case studies are used to show the evolution of CARICOM's decision and political space vis-a-vis the United States of America. These are the Grenada crisis (1983); the Shiprider Agreements (1996-97); and the Haitian crisis (2004). CARICOM operates within a dynamic decision and political space: depending on the members and the situations, members act within a wide or narrow decision space and a hierarchical or heterarchical political space. When geo-political considerations were paramount, members acted within a hierarchical political space which maintained the core-periphery relationship of which the United States was the core. Now that the United States' resources are being diverted to other areas to address terrorism, inter alia, CARICOM countries need to, for a change, exercise consensus in their actions and make decisions that maximise geo-economic considerations.

The Inferior Science and the Dominant Use of English in Knowledge Production

This article examines international scientific activities in the context of hierarchical international relations and how English use is related to inequality in core-periphery relationships. However, the author recognizes that the theoretical concept of colonialist discourse is too dichotomous to apply to the multilayered structure of the real world. To some extent, Traweek’s notion of “the acceptance of the Euro-American dominant scientist” can be related to English use in the means of achieving a competent scientist for nonnative English speakers who are located in the periphery. This becomes a social-structural problem of using another language to nonnative English-speaking scientists and engineers. Korean scientists’ and engineers’ international scientific activities are greatly motivated by sociocultural determinants such as cultural prejudice, their peripheral position, reputation and recognition, and English competence. Although English use greatly affects their international activities, especially paper publication in international journals, they tend to disregard the general English problem by separating general English use from scientific English use.

Core–periphery relations in the Recuay hinterlands: economic interaction at Chinchawas, Peru

The author explores a changing core–periphery relationship in first millennium AD Peru, from the viewpoint of a small North Highlands village.

Economic Globalisations: Ireland in the EU – 1973–2003

Irish experiences since joining the EEC/EU (1973) have been closely linked to globalisations and changing core-periphery relationships. Transitions in economic patterns in time-space contexts became especially evident in the 1990s, but what is interesting is that Ireland did not follow classic development paths associated with Western economies. With EU membership, Foreign Direct Investment must be seen in context and scale. For insights into this, the strategic areas of manufacturing, agriculture and tourism are examined. Like tourism with incoming and outgoing visitors, globalisation is a two-way process with imports, exports, and inwards and outwards investment. Analysis of Ireland and globalisation would be incomplete without reference to Northern Ireland, which is too often the case.

A path-dependent model of investment and employment flow in a large economy in a process of integration

This paper meant to analyze the spatial evolution of a large country in its process of integration with the world economy in general, and, to look into the possible effect of China’s accession into WTO on the future development of its spatial economy in particular. Through an approach of increasing returns, external economy, product differentiation and path-dependence, with foreign trade costs incurred by different regions within the large country discriminated, a model of investment and employment flow is developed as a simulation of a large country’s process of integration with the world economy. The modeling indicates that in the process of integration, as there exist differences in foreign trade costs among different regions within the large country, either the spatial economy of the country deviates from its symmetric structure in autarky and falls into a core-periphery relationship, or the effect of industrial agglomeration is reinforced, amplified and locked in, if the agglomeration had been started. The economic gap on either the aggregate or structural basis between different regions within the large country will increase rapidly as the integration proceeds.

REGIONAL CONVERGENCE AND THE ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE OF PERIPHERAL AREAS IN TURKEY

The objective of this paper is to examine regional convergence and core‐periphery relations in Turkey. The main question explores the degree to which there has been a transformation of interregional disparities in terms of “convergence” and performance of peripheral regions in Turkey by considering GDP per capita over the 1980‐97 period. As a result of σ and β convergence (absolute and conditional) analyses, following Barro and Sala‐i‐Martin (1995), there is no evidence for convergence across both provinces and the functional regions in Turkey from 1980 to 1997. Moreover, a high level of the spatial dependence was revealed. Therefore, the level of regional GDP per capita growth was highly related to the neighbors and disparities are still obvious between the east and west of Turkey. Most of the new dynamic areas are also located in the west. Notwithstanding policies for “Priority Provinces in Development” (PPD), the findings of the convergence analysis indicates that PPDs do not grow faster than core‐developed provinces. Moreover, the majority of them remained as poor regions with their neighbors. While the PPDs share similar features compare to the developed provinces, they are differentiated in terms of their performance.

The Spatial Structure of the Labor Market

This paper examines previous studies on the labor market, and reviews research issues concerning its spatial structure.In labor market studies, it has been recognized that the labor market is not a homogeneous structure but a segmented one, due to differences within the labor force in terms of wage disparity, labor movement, and so on. In recent years, much research indicates that the boundaries of the segmentation of the labor market are fluid and indistinct. Labor economists are not very interested in issues related to spatial relations.In Geography, labor market studies have changed in scope since the 1970s. In previous labor market research, there was a tendency to emphasize locational change of manufacturing industry and rural districts, using the local labor market as an approach in dealing with research issues in each field. As a result, these studies did not focus on the spatial structure of the labor market on a national or district scale.In order to further develop research methods in this field, several issues need to be resolved.Firstly, we must examine the spatial structure of the labor market on a national or district scale. It is necessary to regard the local labor market as a labor market area formed by the interaction of its supply and demand-side, and to examine its spatial structure. One of the most effective methods to understand its spatial structure is via cluster analysis which describes local labor markets on variables representing labor market conditions.Secondly, we must consider the mechanisms that operate the spatial structure of the labor market. Although the influence of the location of industrial job opportunities mainly affects the labor market, we need to consider other factors to explain its spatial structure. It is necessary to examine the labor supply structure in each local labor market, the distance from the central city, changes in industrial structures, locality, longstanding conventions, and so on. Since the 1970s, the major proportion of employees in the employment structure of Japan has shifted from the manufacturing to the service sector. Following the collapse of the bubble economy, the number of young people entering the labor market as non-regular workers has increased in metropolitan areas. When we analyze factors other than the core-periphery relationship, it is expected that the mechanisms causing regional differences in labor market conditions, such as unemployment and labor supply and demand, will become increasingly clear.

Tethered Connectivity? The Spatial Distribution of Wireless Infrastructure

At current growth rates, the number of wireless subscribers will surpass that of fixed telephones in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. This fundamental shift in telecommunications has led many to believe that wireless technologies will break the ‘tyranny of geography’, help close the digital divide between core and periphery locations, and allow firms to be more footloose. This paper will examine the spatial distribution of wireless infrastructure in the United States to determine if the core–periphery relationship of cities is altered by wireless technologies. To do so the analysis will compare wireless infrastructure with Internet infrastructure and telephone switch infrastructure with a focus on data infrastructure in all three categories. The infrastructure datasets will be then compared with population distributions to determine their impacts on a spatial digital divide. The results of the study will provide a snapshot of the geography of wireless technologies, a comparison with other terrestrial communications, and insight into the policy of infrastructure delivery.

FDI facilitated by agglomeration economies: evidence from manufacturing and services joint ventures in China

The open door policy of China’s economic reform since the 1980s has attracted heavy foreign direct investment (FDI) flows into China and especially to Guangdong (particularly the Pearl River Delta region, PRD) and induced significant economic growth during the past two decades. While there exist various classical theories of FDI in attempting to identify the determinants of FDI inflow and to explain the behavior of FDI flows, limited attention has been given from the perspective of agglomeration effects generated by a core-periphery (CP) relation. This paper intends to study the impacts of agglomerations on FDI inflows in the context of Krugman’s CP relation (1991) by investigating (1) the formation of a CP relation via gravity model analysis; (2) whether different types of industry FDI flows will respond differently in the CP-system, given agglomeration effects; and (3) whether FDI origin and firm scale matter in affecting FDI flows. A database consisting of a population frame of 37,742 firm-level manufacturing and services joint ventures investing in Guangdong in 1998 was used. Empirical results show that the agglomerations of the CP relation have affected FDI flow patterns. While both manufacturing and services FDI and sources of investment responded differently to the impacts, smaller firms were found more responsive to the CP-agglomeration settings regardless of FDI by industry type and by source. The significance and implications of the CP-system to further facilitate FDI in the region are discussed.

Can the Arctic Council and the Northern Forum find common ground?

AbstractThe Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (the forerunner of the Arctic Council) and the Northern Forum are both products of the sea change in Arctic politics occurring in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Both are soft law arrangements and both are lightly institutionalized. Yet these similarities have not provided a basis for collaboration between the Arctic Council (AC) and the Northern Forum (NF). For the most part, the two bodies have behaved like ships passing in the night. This article seeks to explain this lack of collaboration and to evaluate future prospects in this realm. The lack of collaboration is attributable in part to a number of sources of tension or fault lines, including issues relating to core-periphery relations, the concerns of indigenous peoples, divergent constituencies, the Russian connection, and bureaucratic politics and the complexities of political leadership. In part, it stems from ambiguities about the status of the AC and the NF combined with restrictions on the roles these bodies can play. There is little prospect of combining the two bodies into a more comprehensive Arctic regime. But there are opportunities to devise a realistic division of labor and to develop useful coordination mechanisms. The AC, for example, is the appropriate vehicle for efforts to strengthen the voice of the Arctic regarding global issues; the NF is well-suited to dealing with matters of community viability. Ultimately, the two bodies might consider creating a joint working group on sustainable development or organizing occasional joint meetings of the AC's Senior Arctic Officials and the NF's Executive Committee.

Tourism and Peripherality: Perspectives from Asia and the South Pacific

This paper argues that effective policy-making for peripheral regions requires a greater understanding of the nature and structure of the linkages between cores and peripheries. First, the literature is reviewed and two distinctive approaches to tourism and peripherality are outlined, the attributes-based and the structural. The attributes-based approach focuses on the conditions and characteristics of the regions themselves, in this context on their attributes as tourist destinations. The structural approach emphasises the functional relationships between focal peripheral regions and other areas, especially cores. This latter approach is then developed with reference to the examples of Sarawak and Samoa. Core-periphery relationships are examined there at a range of spatial scales with regard to marketing and distribution channels, air transport and planning. Finally, some policy implications are presented and some parallels with the Nordic situation are offered.

Envelopment or development? The role of roads as conductors of change in upland areas of Sarawak, Malaysia

In most developing countries, rural development remains a high priority because the majority of the population, and of the poor, lives in rural areas. Nevertheless, progress in rural development has been hampered by structur al and institutional biases against the rural poor. Lipton (1977), echoing the dependency theorists' notion of core-periphery relationships, has identified the problem of 'urban bias'. He argues that there is a systematic tendency for a country's resources to be unfairly and inefficiently distributed in favour of urban areas, to the detriment of people living in rural areas. Sarawak has a population density of only 13 people per square kilometre (Sarawak Branch 1994) and the rural population is widely scattered through out the remote areas of the state. To overcome these problems of isolation, one rural development strategy has been to concentrate resources in large scale land development schemes and then to bring people to these centres. It is expected that this would assist government in providing education and health services, and agricultural production would increase through efficiencies associated with economies of scale - an agro-industrial mode of rural development (Marsden et al. 2001). However, these land schemes have encountered many problems (King 1986; Cramb 1992; Hewgill 1999), and in any case can only cater for a fraction of the rural population. An alternative development strategy, which would address the needs of the majority of peo ple living in rural areas, is to provide road access and encourage the rural population to develop in situ. Rural roads represent the link between the urban 'core' and the rural 'periphery'. They have the potential to counter some of the disadvantages of remoteness and provide benefits to all groups within a community. Roads do not inherently favour the rural elite (although such people may be in a better position to take advantage of new opportunities), thus satisfying Chambers' (1983) requirement for rural development strategies that benefit women, the most remote, and the most poor. In addition, a focus on an in situ

Trade Liberalization and Peripheral Postindustrialization in the Caribbean

AbstractIn the 1990s, trade liberalization eroded the competitiveness of Caribbean economies as manufacturing export platforms. Proposed new economic strategies favored a shift from vertically integrated, transnationally based segment manufacturing to segments of knowledge-intensive industries and services. This strategy, however, reproduces the economic asymmetries associated with the core-periphery relation (low wages, value-added rates). Postindustrial technologies and economic strategies provide the opportunity to formulate alternative policies to overcome the shortcomings of peripheral postindustrialization and foster sustainable postindustrial development.

ROBERT TIGNOR, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya, 1945–1963 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). Pp. 426. $60.00.

The Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War have been accompanied by a declining interest in Marxian-inspired theories of political economy in the study of core–periphery relations. Concepts such as dependency and imperialism have been replaced by market forces and structural adjustment. Similarly, post-modernism's impact has been to erode interest in historical theories, especially those with a teleological bent. Thus, Robert Tignor's study, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, is refreshing in raising issues that have not been central to the recent intellectual agenda in the study of non-Western societies.

Local economic impacts of dragon tourism in Indonesia

Ecotourism in protected areas is viewed as a sustainable alternative to mass tourism and as a means of providing benefits to local communities which bear the greatest opportunity costs of protection. However, these ideals have rarely been tested. This study used small-scale survey methods to examine the magnitude and distribution of tourism employment and revenue generation in communities in an Indonesian park. Results suggest that distributional inequalities favor external operators and urban gateway residents rather than rural villagers. Just as the local economy remains peripheral to regional and national centers, so core-periphery relations also exist within the local context. Development around the park has yet to re-orient itself to the goals of ecotourism.

Public Capital and Economic Growth: Issues of Quantity, Finance, and Efficiency

Over the past decade, a large body of theoretical and empirical research has considered the importance of the quantity of public capital for economic growth. For the most part, the empirical results point to a positive role for public capital in determining steady state levels of output per capita and transitional growth rates. At the same time, other work has pointed out the importance of the means of financing government spending for economic growth, with the empirical results indicating a negative influence of higher government spending (proxying for a higher rate of taxation of private sector economic activities) on economic growth. Finally, there is a budding literature on the importance of the effectiveness, or efficiency, of public capital to the growth process; the limited results in the literature suggest that the effectiveness of use of the public capital stock has a meaningful positive influence on growth. This paper develops a common framework to investigate the importance of all three of these aspects of the provision of public capital for growth in output per worker. The paper includes a simple extension of the neoclassical growth model of Solow (1956) and Swan (1956), and a consideration of the relative importance of the three aspects of public capital: "how much you have," "how you pay for it," and how you use it." (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Vikings and Tigers: Finland, Sweden, and adoption of environmental technologies in Southeast Asia's pulpand paper industries

This paper examines structural dimensions of the influence of core-per iphery relations on adoption of environmental technologies in newly industrializing countries (NICs), using Nordic involvement in development of Southeast Asian pulp manufacturing in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a case study. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Southeast Asia was one of the first places in the world to employ new cleaner technologies in pulp and paper manufacturing. How did this happen? This paper argues that adoption of these technologies was influenced by dynamics within the world-system combined with the intentional actions of firms, states, and social movements over a 30-year period. The paper concludes that diffusion of the new environmental technologies is resulting in cleaner production in the periphery even while being part of a trend toward increased polarization between core and peripheral states, economies, and firms. Data were gathered from fieldwork in Southeast Asia from 1993-96; correspondence with Nordic firms, organizations and individuals in attendance and interviews at industry trade shows; and use of available data. Portions of the paper are derived from a larger study of adoption of environmental technologies in the pulp and paper industries of Southeast Asia and Australia.

Peripheries of the periphery: Tourism in Tobago and Barbuda

Using the two Caribbean archipelagic states of Trinidad and Tobago and Antigua and Barbuda as case studies, this paper explores the interaction between tourism and the internal core-periphery relationships which exist between dominant and subordinate islands. It was found that Antigua functions as a tourism facilitating internal core in that its role in Barbudan tourism is limited to the facilitation of foreign involvement in the sector. Trinidad, in contrast, because of its greater wealth, has functioned as a tourism participatory internal core, wherein significant involvement in Tobago is extended to include the generation of domestic tourists and tourism investment. In these cases, tourism was identified as a centrifugal force which both reflects and amplifies existing core-periphery relationships.