Measuring Transition and Mobility in the Hierarchical World–Economy
用马尔可夫链分析1960-1990年间国家在世界经济中的流动性和转型，发现虽有适度流动，但整体结构未显著变化，对研究全球经济发展和世界体系理论的学者有参考价值。
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.