The changing world system: Economic dominance, political dominance, and Third World development, 1945-1985

This study has investigated national economic development during the period from 1945 to 1985. It has attempted to overcome the limitations of the predominantly economically-oriented dependency theory by emphasizing the political aspect of world-system. The results confirm the conventional dependency argument of growing global inequality. That is, the rich nations in fact got richer and the poor got poorer, and there was very little positional mobility of individual nation-states in the stratified world-system. This study found an interesting regularity in various nations' mobility along the economic and political spectra. The OECD nations were undoubtedly the leaders of world politics as well as of the world economy. Third World nations were economically and politically inferior to both the OECD and the CPE countries. The results also revealed a regional variation of economic development; Latin American countries had failed to utilize their internal resources to promote their economic development, while other nations did. Finally, a nation's position in the world politics was found to be operating together with internal conditions to shape a nation's economic position in the world-system.