"Theoretical perspectives on international stratification include concepts involving strata or tiers of countries that have different levels of development, or different relations with the global economy. The two dominant theoretical traditions are world-systems and modernization theories. In this paper, I consider both perspectives while examining how the stratification of countries has changed since 1960. Fifty years of World Bank data on national GDP were examined and rank-ordered, tracking shifts in the positions of important countries and assessing these patterns to see whether the data were more consistent with one of these theories. The results showed a pattern in which the world's wealthiest states stably tended to constitute approximately 15% of the world's population over time. This pattern supported the idea of a 'core' economic area, as defined by world-systems theory, but the distribution of states with the bottom 85% of the world's population provided evidence against other concepts of world-systems theory and was better accounted for by modernization theory. The number of states that are predominantly peripheral in character has been shrinking greatly over time, and the population within those states now constitutes a minority of the world's population, while the majority of the world now lives in what have been characterized as semi-peripheral areas. Longitudinal economic data therefore strongly suggests that the original world-systems classification schema must be revised, reconciled with, or replaced by modernization theory in order to accurately describe the 21st century world economy."--Page ii.
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