Measuring Transition and Mobility in the Hierarchical World-Economy

This paper provides a temporal stochastic framework that is used to analyze economic transitions of countries in the world-system. As such, it provides a contribution to a general quantitative rendering of the world-systems perspective. State space modeling using Markov chains provides a powerful stochastic instrument for global economic modeling when structure is known but relational uncertainty is present as well as for examining temporal change of geographic phenomena. Two phenomena are examined: (1) country mobility among regional classes within the world-economy; and (2) the stability of the rate of country-level transitions. Results suggest that although a moderate amount of movement has taken place in the period 1960-1990, the overall structure of the world-economy has not changed significantly. Thus, although the developmental hypothesis that countries are upwardly mobile has merit, empirical results suggest that very little impact is observed in the world-system because countries moving upward in the world-economy region sequence are nearly balanced by countries moving down the sequence. Copyright 2002 Blackwell Publishers Inc.