Core and Periphery: Dependency, World Systems, and the Brandt Line

The idea

The exam's spatial-interaction item names core and periphery, and the anchor's development chapter, read with Finlayson's first chapter, supplies the geography and the theories that explain it. The geography first. The Brandt line, drawn in nineteen eighty, divides a Global North, the countries generally considered more developed, from a Global South, generally less developed; Finlayson draws the same map as core and periphery, with a semi-periphery between. The United Nations sorts the poor end further: the least developed countries, forty-eight of them in twenty fifteen by the anchor's count, home to nine hundred fifty million people, more than half earning under one dollar twenty-five a day, a dated figure voiced with its year; the anchor prefers developing, a dynamic label, to LDC, a static one. The theories second, all attributed. Modernization theory and Rostow's stages say every country can climb the same ladder with the right intervention. Dependency theory answers that the global system disadvantages certain regions: colonial trade made some countries producers of low-profit goods, pineapple, sugar, rubber, and the trade system outlived independence, so they remain dependent. World systems theory generalizes it: one world economy in which some countries benefit while others are exploited. The resource curse, or Dutch disease, adds that places rich in natural resources are often harmed by extracting them. The institutions third. The International Monetary Fund lends short-term to governments in crisis and attaches structural adjustment programs; the World Bank, founded near the war's end, lends for large projects; the World Trade Organization promotes trade and enforces agreements, created, the anchor's glossary says, in nineteen ninety-four, an agreement signed that year for an organization operating from nineteen ninety-five, as unit 09's anchor has it. The anchor's own close is voiced as its own: history seems to favor openness, at serious risk; a country can spend itself into debt and upheaval, its example Brazil; and seventy years of gains, healthier, longer, richer, fewer children, have come at an environmental cost that makes sustainability the anchor for decisions ahead.