Which of the following talks of a global core periphery system of inequality

Resource Peripheries

Resource peripheries are regions where resource industries are significant dimensions of economic activity, especially in relation to exports; the vulnerabilities of resource industries during short-term business cycles and especially over longer resource cycles are shared and compounded in resource peripheries. Especially in the context of the plantation model, once closely overlapping developing aspirations between community (or region) and corporation are increasingly likely to diverge as resource cycles mature. Ghost towns that symbolize the end of resource cycles need not imply ghost corporations. Resource-based MNCs have location options for investment and this location flexibility is itself a source of instability in peripheries, for example, with respect to labor bargaining or negotiations over taxes, the cost of local services and subsidies. Technological changes that reduce jobs (and costs) increase corporate profitability but have more problematic impacts on communities. Moreover, resource communities, dispersed and specialized according to where resources happen to be, are often (increasingly) remote from markets with limited opportunities to diversify. These restrictions themselves are built into resource cycles. During boom times, when wages, profits, employment, and optimism for resource longevity are high, there is no local incentive, nor any mandate by MNCs or unionized workforces, to contemplate diversification. During busts, remoteness, foreign control, specialized infrastructure and worker skills, and competition with other places restrict the ability to diversify.

In Australia and Canada, government resource planning policy has been reformulated by the apparent relentless imperatives of resource cycles. Thus the opening up of remote resource regions during the ‘Fordist’ boom years from the 1950s to the 1970s was celebrated by the planned frontier (resource) town offering a full range of social amenities to workers and their families. This concept is now replaced by ‘fly-in’ workforces, brought in to exploit the resource as needed on a planned temporary basis, with no need for fixed community investments nor worries for future obsolescence.

The logic of resource cycles resonates closely with Auty’s thesis that resource-rich developing countries experience a ‘resource curse’ and by the parallel notions that resource peripheries in Canada and the US are ‘trapped’ within or ‘addicted’ to resource cycles. No matter how powerful, resource cycle dynamics that culminate in depletion and trapped, addicted, and cursed peripheries are nevertheless tendencies not laws that need to be placed in distinct commodity, historical, and geographical contexts and related contingencies. At any particular period and place, resource cycles and curses (or traps) need to be understood in relation to specific local–global dynamics that include the trade regulations by foreign governments and the assignment of resource rights by domestic governments, and how these regulations and rights are organized by MNCs, local entrepreneurs, and others within production chains linking resources to markets. Dauvergne, for example, interprets the deforestation of Southeast Asia in terms of the cumulative interdependent effect of MNCs with local, traditional ‘patron-client’ politics, based on mutual favors and asymmetric power relations, driven by Japanese demand for wood.

Perceived Gaps: Core and Peripheral Identities

Core–periphery gaps go beyond structural data. They are also ‘lived,’ and therefore perceived and constructed realities. In fact, in the core there is a feeling of belonging dominated by the concept of techno-economic and social progress, of human perfectibility, and, based on the values of enlightened rationalism, of secularized and individualized societies, the spirit of capitalism, and so forth. Max Weber would have described such identities as ‘disenchanted’ ones. Maybe the most fitting description of this type of identity is precisely the one supplied by Max Weber in his model on Occidental uniqueness (Weber, 1986), which, despite what Max Weber intended to prove, was used to validate European superiority and the core's hegemonic aims on the peripheries.

In European peripheries instead, especially among the intellectual elites, there is an awareness of the marginality if not the backwardness of one's country or its historical region. However, there is also a strong belief that one's nation or people has outstanding excellence and virtues. Peripheral elites have been coping with the discrepancy between their nation's perceived socioeconomic inferiority and its presumed spiritual and moral superiority even at the brink of the formation of their respective nation-states. European peripheries' ruling-class interpretation of this apparent contradiction has been remarkably ambivalent as regards to relationships with the core as a socioeconomic and cultural complex. Quoting Reinhard Bendix's terminology, the core is looked upon as a ‘reference society,’ with whom there is both an ‘identification’ and a ‘distinction’ relationship (Bendix, 1978). An emulation of the core is encouraged, while dissociation is maintained as well. Over the past 150 years, almost every European periphery has undergone major modernization processes emulating the core, which affected all aspects of society. However, these processes were accompanied by archaistic countertrends (agrarian populist movements, nationalisms, etc.) that instead glorified what was deemed as the past, tradition, culture, and identity of one's group. A modernization drive and a nativistic revival were both at work.

A modernization drive basically means a Europeanization, particularly of politics (establishment of parliamentary institutions and legal systems), economy (industrialization), culture (more theaters, art museums, avant-garde arts, etc.), and even everyday life (new habits, conventions, and ephemeral fads from the capitals of ‘reference societies’ – Paris, Vienna, or Berlin). Nativistic revival means stressing one's distinguishing difference from the core and revitalizing imagined social institutions, guardians, and bearers of primordial virtues, such as the village, rural community, medieval municipality, or guilds.

3.7 Perceived Gaps and Peripheral Knowledge

Core–periphery gaps go beyond structural data. They are also ‘lived,’ therefore ‘perceived’ and ‘constructed’ realities. In European peripheries, especially among the intellectual élites, there is an awareness of the ‘marginality’ if not the ‘backwardness’ of one's country or its ‘historical region.’ However, there is also a strong belief that one's ‘nation’ or ‘people’ has outstanding ‘excellence’ and ‘virtues.’ ‘Peripheral élites’ have been coping with the discrepancy between their nation's perceived socioeconomic ‘inferiority’ and its presumed spiritual and moral ‘superiority’ since just before the formation of their respective nation-states. European peripheries' ruling classes' interpretation of this apparent contradiction has been remarkably ambivalent as regards to relationships with the core as a socioeconomic and cultural complex. Quoting Bendix's terminology, the core is looked upon as a ‘reference society’ with which there is both an ‘identification’ and a ‘distinction’ relationship (Bendix 1978). Emulation of the core is encouraged while dissociation is maintained as well. Over the past 150 years, almost every European periphery underwent major modernization processes, emulating the core, which included all aspects of society. However, these processes were accompanied by ‘archaistic’ counter-trends (agrarian populist movements, nationalisms, etc.) which instead glorified what was deemed to be the ‘past,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘culture,’ ‘identity’ of one's group. Modernization drives and nativistic revivals were both at work.

A modernization drive basically means ‘Europeanization,’ particularly of politics (establishment of parliamentary institutions and legal systems), the economy (industrialization), culture (more theaters, art museums, avant-garde arts, etc.), and even everyday life (new habits, conventions, and ephemeral fads from the capitals of ‘reference societies’—Paris, Vienna, or Berlin). Nativistic revival means stressing one's ‘difference’ to be distinguished from the core, and revitalizing ‘imagined’ social institutions, guardians and bearers of ‘primordial virtues,’ such as the village, rural community, medieval municipality, or guilds.

Global South Urbanization and Peri-Urban Processes

Cities and peripheries are interdependent, and the specific character of a city is the product of a series of time- and space-specific interactions and linkages. In this process, city-regions have played a significant role by crafting core-periphery relationships. There exist distinctive variations in the evolutionary processes involved in city-region making across the Global South. The imperialist domination and varied forms of colonial exploitation interrupted this spatial balance. The position of periphery vis-à-vis the core cities started to become asymmetrical. The urbanization process in the Global South is often characterized as top heavy and is marked by primacy (a single large and dominant city), spatial imbalance, social inequality, and slum development, and a limited number of overburdened mega cities surrounded by innumerable cities and towns of lower order and impoverished peripheries. All these regions grew culturally and socially heterogeneous due to interregional migration. The same brought in the aspect of the politics of identity as a major local force in shaping the developmental politics of the urban region. Structural inequalities became core within urban and regional systems.

For example, extreme inequalities were structured in the Latin American urban systems through hindered accumulation where a part of the surplus capital produced by urban actors was top sliced and sent abroad—expatiated—under titles of profit remittance, service on foreign debts, unfavorable terms of trade, and chronic deficits in services. This was done in such a way that very little surplus was accumulated within the city-region itself, weakening the overall economy. A majority of African cities and their regions were known as apartheid cities with clear social segregation along racial identities. Urban space also reflected such spatial segregation with White, Black, and South Asian populations residing in separate neighborhoods. West Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia had different urban experiences due to their different historical settings. Although West Asia experienced rapid urbanization in the decades of 1950s–1970s, this urban dynamism could not be sustained, as urban processes were based more on oil-linked earnings and growing construction industries: a wider base of industrialization was missing. Southeast Asia, similarly, experienced a rapid urbanization in the decades of 1980s and 1990s pertaining to the new economic policy and developmental pattern that was largely based on foreign direct investment in key industries like electronics, electrical and so on. In early 1980s, the birth of a new China with its distinct economic policies for getting connected globally influenced most of the Asian countries. Countries from South Asia share a typical colonial history with that of African and Latin American countries. South Asia also witnessed lopsided patterns of urban development, leading to primacy and metropolitan dominance.

Throughout these transformations, cities emerged as dominant. In contrast, the peripheries weakened, stagnated, and degenerated. In the postindependent era, efforts were made to decentralize primarily to strengthen the peripheries. But most of the policies turned out to be city-centric, and these policies served to rescue “mother” cities from the problem of “overurbanization.” Metropolitan regional development became a key factor in diffusing growth over a wider region. Satellite town building and radial finger development planning became common in the megacities of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Delhi, Madras, and Kolkata. Cities remained highly exploitative vis-à-vis their peripheries and were characterized by income inequalities and sociospatial polarization. Various planning experiments were attempted, most based on Western planning models, but they could not provide real solutions. Interestingly, in spite of different developmental processes and patterns of urbanization, all these countries shared common problems of economic, social, and spatial fragmentations. But a weakening economy, increasing debt burdens and pressures from international agencies in early 1980s brought in the policy prescription of globalization, imposing a free trade regime upon these countries, leading to a new era of recentralization and new regionalism in the form of global city-regions. This recentralization can be witnessed in terms of investments and population concentration. (Fig. 1 and Table 1).

Table 1. Foreign direct investments in global south (in million dollars).

Region1990200020102016North Africa1155.53250.115 745.914 471.5West Africa1553.42130.912 024.311 432.8Central Africa- 1.2670.47776.65119.1East Africa132.91123.95539.77101.5Southern Africa4.63771.420 000.821 247.9East Asia9143.1111 798.1201 806.4260 033.2South-East Asia12 820.822 514.8110 559.4101 098.9South Asia212.84866.334 911.853 735.5West Asia796.43618.463 146.627 797.3South America5044.257 104.2132 277.4100 578.7Central America3055.520 747.633 801.538 186.7

Source: World Investment Report, UNCTAD, 2017.

International agencies like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Asian Development Bank played a decisive role in making the Global South “understand” the significance of “healthy” global urban competition. Once again, the peripheries of megacities were repositioned, as several policy initiatives were planned by national and city governments to encourage rapid urban expansions over a wider geographic area in the name of decentralization through centrifugal forces. These initiatives were again city-centric, as the megacities were reselected to be engines of economic growth and grow as important nodes in the global urban hierarchy. Pertaining to the same, the larger territories in the form of peri-urban spaces were selected only to supplement the growth of their mother cities. These spaces became the biggest supplier of land, water, building materials to cities, and so on.

As these spaces are placed at the bottom of a regional spatial hierarchy, they are considered to be passive and remain subservient to various other higher ordered spaces. As a result, these spaces are planned to absorb anything and everything without much choice. This entails a broad land use zoning method that is mostly used in peri-urban planning. Peri-urban spaces are put to arbitrary land use. Such pattern of peri-urban development is evident across the Global South. China, to some extent, differs because of the autonomous status of urban local governments. Some of the poorer African countries also have emerged with an inclusive model of peri-urban development that advocates integration of typically rural economies with typically urban functions. For instance, SPLUMA initiative in South Africa advocates integration of agro-based activities scattered around peri-urban into a systematic agro-based urban retail chain. With the exception of China, most of the peri-urban regions are rendered passive in the process of peri-urban development and planning. Here, a key question is who controls the process of spatial development.

Abstract

Core–periphery models have been developed by researchers in different areas of knowledge in an attempt to generate links and connections with spaces tending to constantly differentiate. Urban or economic geographies have been crossed by economic, political, or sociological perspectives, generating different ways to go beyond the economic or the geographical view. They have two different aims, depending on the model: to analyze the change and transformation of different societies or modes of production, and to propose different ways in which change and transformation affect countries, regions, or cities. We recognize two types of models: those where changes at the national scale explain regional differences, or international models with an economic emphasis, which assume that world markets and trade are the main aspects producing change and evolution in countries and regions. In both cases, arguments regarding the causes of development and underdevelopment generate different theories around the subject. They were adopted by geographers, directly or indirectly, in different areas of human geography and different territorial scales.

Foragers Meet Farmers: the Rhine–Maas Delta and Alpine Lake Basins

On the periphery of the Linear Pottery area, two other regions provide additional evidence for an indigenous response to the proximity of farmers. The lake basins of the Alpine Foreland in southern Germany, Switzerland, and eastern France supported populations of Mesolithic foragers, while in the combined delta of the Rhine and Maas (Meuse) rivers in the Netherlands, hunter-gathers gradually became aware of the farming populations to their south. In both areas, domesticated plants and animals worked their way into the forager diet during the centuries just before 4000 BC (see Mesolithic Cultures).

The excellent preservation conditions in the Rhine–Maas delta have provided a remarkable record of the reaction of hunter-gatherers to the proximity of farmers, in this case the Linear Pottery and Rössen communities about 100–150 km to the south, during the fifth and fourth milleniums BC. At Hardinxveld near Rotterdam, several dunes were the sites of winter base camps of hunter-gatherers between 5500 and 4450 BC. In the upper levels, dating after 4700 BC, bones of domestic animals were found, although cereals were absent. After about 4300 BC, there is clearer evidence for contact between foragers and farmers, for pottery found at sites like Hazendonk has stylistic affinities to late Rössen wares. Bones of domestic animals and charred chaff and grains of domestic cereals reflect what Leendert P. Louwe Kooijmans has called a ‘semi-agrarian’ economy, which combined the use of domestic plants and animals with a broad exploitation of wild species. This type of subsistence pattern appears to have lasted for several centuries.

The ‘missing link’ between the semi-agrarian economy of the late hunter-gatherers and the full farming economy of the later part of the Neolithic has been provided by the site of Schipluiden, excavated in 2003. Located on coastal dunes, Schipluiden provides traces of an economy with a continued mix of wild and domesticated species but with a greater role played by domesticated plants and animals. The settlement remains are more substantial than at Hazendonk and contain locally made pottery, dense concentrations of posts, a fence around the settlement, long-term use of discard areas, and both summer and winter birds, suggesting year-round occupation by about four or five households during some time between 3700 and 3400 BC. Contracted burials suggest adoption of the burial rite used by Neolithic communities to the south.

The Alpine Foreland of southern Germany and northern and western Switzerland saw a similar confrontation between foraging and farming. The lake basins of this area were populated by communities of hunter-gatherers, as reflected by the site of Henauhof-Nord on the Federsee in southern Germany, during the second half of the sixth millennium BC. During the succeeding millennium, lakeside farming communities using domestic plants and animals but also continuing to hunt and gather were established along the lakeshores. One such settlement is found at Egolzwil, one of the classic sites of the so-called Swiss Lake Dwellings, which contrary to popular reconstructions of houses built on piles over the water were really post structures built on the muddy lake shores. By 3900 BC, settlements like Hornstaad Hörnle on Lake Constance provide evidence of a full agricultural economy based on sustained cultivation of wheat and barley.

Concepts of center and periphery became increasingly prominent in the social sciences during the second half of the twentieth century. They were of diverse origins and entailed varied emphases, and actually there have been a number of related conceptual pairs: center and periphery, but also core and periphery, metropolis and satellite, and metropolis and province. But they have not been mere synonyms. Moreover, in obscure and perhaps treacherous ways, ideas of center and periphery may occasionally have overlapped in social thought and discourse with other classical contrasts, such as modernity/tradition, or urban/folk. The article contrasts the classic consensualist perspective of Edward Shils, emphasizing the symbolic authority of the center and the deference to it on the part of the periphery, with the conflict-oriented views of, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein in world-system theory and Andre Gunder Frank, drawing on dependency theory. It points out that centers are identified at quite varying levels, ranging between notions such as ‘the North,’ countries, or cities, and notes that the world becomes increasingly multicentric as various life styles and subcultures can now orient themselves to distant points in space by way of improved communication and transportation facilities. The old assumption of diffusion from center to periphery is seen as problematic, in the context of current emphases on resistance and hybridity. Sentiments toward centers, it is argued, can be of varied kinds, and are not seldom mixed.

Core and Periphery

The exploitation of the periphery by the core characterizes the division of labor within the modern world-system. In the core, high wages, advanced technology, and a diversified production dominates. In contrast, the periphery has low wages, rudimentary technology, and a simple production mix. In world trade, low-priced peripheral products are exchanged with high-priced products from the core. The strength of core states enforces this unequal exchange.

The initial differences in wealth in the agricultural division of labor were relatively small, but later developed into huge gaps. The spatial division of labor between core and periphery is always present in the structural TimeSpace of the world-system. The types of goods exchanged vary between different cyclico-ideological TimeSpaces. After the initial, mostly agricultural, division of labor came the unequal exchange between industrial products and peripheral raw materials. Nowadays, many industrial products come from the periphery, and the core profits from its dominance of the high tech service sector.

The exploitation of the periphery by the core is also based on a different class structure. Wages in the periphery can be so low, while workers as members of larger income sharing households have other means of subsistence. These semiproletarian households augment income from the market with other sources, like subsistence farming. In addition, migration of young workers from rural regions to cities shifts the reproduction costs away from the commercialized sector in the cities to their rural homeland. Semiproletarian households extend beyond the living conditions of the here and now; they span generations and extend in space.

The workers in the core use their much stronger bargaining position to increase their pay. Their income is large enough to sustain their households over time. Figure 6 depicts the relation between exploitation between classes (vertical), and unequal exchange in the modern world-system (horizontal).

The spatial separation of core and periphery characterizes our world-system. Spatial preconditions, like resources and other production potentials, were initially important. Spatial separation facilitated the development of the different production structures in core and periphery. The different class structures are part of this. The spatial coincidence of social divisions with differences in wealth hinders the development of a class-based consciousness and helps the interpretation of spatial differences in racist terms. While the increased transportation opportunities make distance less relevant for the spatial separation between core and periphery, core states increasingly use border controls to hinder migration to their more profitable labor markets. Although changing in character over time, the spatial separation of core and periphery secures the world-system (Figures 7–9).

The semiperiphery also stabilizes our world-system. Semiperipheral states depolarize the relation between core and periphery. The possibility of joining the core appeases the semiperiphery. Its political and economic power is clearly subordinate to the core, but unlike the periphery, it has the possibility of resisting exploitation. In many core states, institutional fixes and congestion stifle development. In the periphery, the absence of good government, services, and skilled labor hamper development. The semiperiphery maximizes the possibility and necessity for development giving it the strongest motivation for state intervention in the economy. Semiperipheral states are the most active in transforming their socioeconomic structure and in protecting their economy from external competition.

Economic cycles generate changes in the location of core and periphery and the products exchanged. These cycles of about 50 years have their origins in the way supply and demand are determined in the modern world-system. The constant drive for more profits of individual firms causes production to rise continually. The demand for goods is the result of a long-term compromise between labor and capital in the nation-states. In a few decades, the steadily growing supply of goods reaches the limits of the relatively constant demand for goods. This results in decades of economic stagnation.

Reducing production costs is the first measure in combating the declining profits during an economic stagnation. Increasing workload and pay cuts reduce labor costs. Transferring production from the core to regions with a lower wage level in the semiperiphery also lowers costs. This also cuts the more hidden production costs, like environmental protection measures. This combination of lax regulation and strong developmental pressures makes the semiperiphery vulnerable to social, cultural, political, and ecological contradictions. It makes the semiperiphery the most dynamic part of the world-system.

In the core, the development of new technologies increases in the later phases of an economic stagnation. New industries with high profit levels restore the position of the core in the world-system.

However, all these measures are only successful in the short run and for specific areas in the world-system. Only expanding worldwide demand can overcome an economic stagnation. For instance, the spread of wealth away from the core revives economic growth. As discussed above, the production of traditional core products shifts toward the semiperiphery. This stimulates the growth of the proletariat at the expense of the semiproletariat.

In the past, incorporating new areas restored the profitability of the spatial division of labor for the core by adding new peripheries. This is no longer possible in our global world-system. The world-system is now entering a structural crisis due to the success of the market economy in expanding in space and into social relations.

Pawnbrokers

Also on the periphery we have “bankers” to the poor and the excluded (who perforce are high-risk borrowers). The major participants in these market niches are pawnbrokers and loan sharks, the former legal and the latter not usually. As of 1991, there were in the United States approximately three times as many pawnbrokers (about 6900) as S&Ls.24 Pawn loans are typically small, say $50–$100. Most of these loans are for a few weeks, sometimes months, and all are secured with merchandise (jewelry, electronics, musical instruments, guns, and the like) with a resale value roughly twice the debt. All-in interest rates range from high to astronomical, and can be as high as 25–30% per month in states without interest rate ceilings. In 2004, it is estimated that there were 15,000 pawnbrokers in the United States.25

Pawnbroking is a traditional form of asset-backed (secured) lending. The lender typically prefers to be repaid rather than taking ownership and liquidating the collateral (this is because the failure to repay usually ruptures a valuable customer relationship), but the creditworthiness of the borrower is rarely at issue (the pawnbroker rarely has the information necessary to form an intelligent judgment, except perhaps in cases of longtime customers). The loan is made entirely on the basis of the borrower’s collateral. Default rates between 10 and 30% are common. The intermediation services provided by pawnbrokers include origination, funding, and market completeness.

Which of the following are characteristics of English urban settlements?

Which century can be characterized as the world's first urban century?

What is the ecological complex and what are its four concepts or categories of variables?

What age saw the most rapid growth rate for American cities?