Counting the Zones of the Capitalist World-System: New Evidence on the Global Income Hierarchy, 1950-2023

• In Event: Political Economy of the World-System Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable I: Class, Culture, and Economic Inequality in the Contemporary World System

Abstract

In the early twenty-first century, the capitalist world-system has undergone major transformations. Some scholars have raised the question of whether the traditional trimodal structure of the capitalist world-system has been replaced by a new quadrimodal structure. This paper uses data from the latest version of the Maddison Project Database and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators to examine the statistical relationship between the distribution of the world population and both absolute and relative measures of income. Results from Gaussian kernel density analysis show that the capitalist world-system has remained trimodal in the early twenty-first century. The paper also employs finite mixture models and modified likelihood ratio tests as a robustness check to evaluate alternative hypotheses regarding the number of “components” in the global income distribution. The results suggest that a trimodal structure remains a reasonable interpretation of the observed data and that there is insufficient evidence to support the hypothesis of an emerging quadrimodal structure.

Author

• Lingyi Wei, University of Utah