The international structure of income and its implications for economic growth, 1960--2000

World-systems theory in sociology posits that individuals around the world fall into one of two broad income levels corresponding to their positions (core or peripheral) in global commodity chains. Countries, however, fall into three broad national income levels, according to whether they encompass mainly peripheral nodes of commodity chains, core nodes, or a mixture of the two. In Book I of this dissertation, I confirm this general theoretical outline of the structure of the world-economy, using a gaussian kernel to smooth histograms of the global income distribution for individuals (Chapter 1) and countries (Chapter 2). Globally, individual incomes are distributed bimodally while national incomes are distributed trimodally. These distributions have held relatively stable over the past forty years.; In Book II of this dissertation, I use the results of Book I to differentiate models of economic growth by zone of the world-economy. In Chapter 3, I use ordinary and weighted least square regression to estimate a standard neoclassical disequilibrium growth model, first for all countries and then by zone of the world-economy. I find that the proportion of working-age adults in a country is a far more important predictor of economic growth than either investment or education flows. In Chapter 4, I use a series of structural equation models, estimated through reiterative maximum likelihood, to disentangle the reciprocal effects of investment (foreign and domestic) on growth and vice versa. I find that while growth seems to promote investment, investment has little or no causal impact on growth.; The general conclusion to be drawn from the present research is that the stable (and highly unequal) structure of income in the world-economy has not been and likely will not be mitigated by investment flows from richer to poorer countries.