Globalization has renewed interest in the place and role of cities in the international system. Recent literature proposes that the fate of cities (and their residents) has become increasingly tied to their position in international flows of investment and trade. Data on the branch locations of the world's 500 largest multinational enterprises in 2000 are subjected to two broad types of network analytic techniques in order to analyze the "world city system." First, 3,692 cities are analyzed in terms of three measures of point centrality. Second, blockmodeling techniques are employed to generalize further about the positions and roles played by cities in the system. These techniques are used to trace out the structure of the world city system, locate cities in the context of a global urban hierarchy, and explore the degree to which this diverges from a simple one-to-one matching of cities onto nation-states in the world system. The phenomenon of globalization has renewed interest in thinking about cities as loci of action in the world system. Recent literature proposes that cities have become increasingly decoupled from local (i.e., regional or national) political geography as the salience of their position in international networks of investment and trade has grown (Friedmann 1986;Knox and Taylor 1995;Sassen 2001). Globalization is argued to be gen-1 Early versions of this paper were presented at
The upswing in economic inequality that has affected a number of advanced industrial societies in the late 20th century has been particularly conspicuous in the United States. The authors explore its causes using data on the distribution of family income in 3,098 U. S. counties in 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. The authors build a model of within-county income inequality that assumes that distribution processes involving labor market and sociodemographic variables operate primarily at the county level and those involving the political and institutional context operate primarily at the state level. Multilevel methods are used to distinguish county cross-sectional, state cross-sectional, and longitudinal effects on inequality. The authors find that, when features of the state-level institutional and political context are associated with inequality, these effects are larger longitudinally than cross-sectionally. A range of other factors, including economic development, labor force changes, shifts in the racial/ethnic and gender composition of the labor force, educational expansion, and urbanization are found to have comparatively large effects, both longitudinally and cross-sectionally.
INEQUALITY TRENDS IN THE LATE 20TH CENTURYOne of the most intriguing socioeconomic trends of the last decades of the 20th century is the upswing in income inequality that was first noted 1 The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of Phil Gibbs, David Lowery, the late Rachel Rosenfeld, John Stephens, and the AJS reviewers. Direct all correspondence to Stephanie Moller,
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