No abstract

World-systems sociologists have long recognized a three-tier structure in the world-economy, which comprises peripheral, semi-peripheral, and core groups of countries. This paper introduces a new database tool for analyzing this structure of the world-economy in terms of national income, the Structure of the World-Economy (SWE) analytical tool. It can be used to chart the structure of the world-economy in terms of income per capita for any year from 1960-2000 based on parameters selected by the user. Results confirm the existence of a three-tier structure of the world-economy that is relatively stable over the period for which data are available. A continuous set of benchmarks for the boundary points separating zones of the world-economy are reported for the period 1975–2002, along with a brief analysis of national mobility across those boundaries. Only seventeen countries (out of 103) made lasting transitions between zones of the world-economy over the study period, mostly due to changes in the prices of natural resources. The results of this study suggest that development policy formation should focus more on the attainable goal of transitioning countries from the periphery to the semiperiphery of the world-economy, and less on achieving an absolute standard of “developed” or core country status.

About one-third of all pregnancies that result in live births in the US are unintended. Despite the large number of these births, little is known about the outcomes of unintended pregnancies. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the association between intendedness of pregnancy and preterm birth in a large prospective cohort of women who reported for prenatal care. Pregnant, black, low-income women were enrolled into this study at four hospital-based prenatal care clinics and one off-site hospital-affiliated prenatal clinic in Baltimore City. A self-administered questionnaire to assess demographic and psychosocial data was completed by each woman in the cohort at the time of enrolment in the study. The questionnaire contained an item to measure intendedness of the pregnancy. A total of 922 women comprised the final sample for analysis. For the analyses, intendedness was dichotomised as: intended (wanted now or sooner) vs. unintended (mistimed, unwanted or unsure). Overall, 13.7% of all births to women in the sample were preterm. In a logistic regression model, after controlling for potential confounding by clinical and behavioural predictors of preterm delivery, unintended pregnancy was significantly associated with preterm delivery (adjusted RR = 1.82, 95% confidence interval [1.08,3.08], P = 0.026). In this study of a cohort of urban, clinic-attending, low-income, pregnant black women, unintended pregnancy had a statistically significant association with preterm birth. After adjustment for behavioural and clinical risks, women with unintended pregnancies had almost twice the risk of a preterm delivery as women with intended pregnancies.

Quantitative social science has long been dominated by self-consciously positivist approaches to the philosophy, rhetoric and methodology of research. This article outlines an alternative approach based on interpretive research methods. Interpretative approaches are usually associated with qualitative social science but are equally applicable to the analysis of quantitative data. In interpretive quantitative research, statistics are used to shed light on the unobservable data generating processes that underlie observed data. Key tenets of interpretive quantitative methodology are the triangulation of research results arrived at by analysing data from multiple perspectives, the integration of measurement and modelling into a more holistic process of discovery and the need to think reflexively about the manner in which data have come into existence. Interpretive quantitative research has the potential to yield results that are more meaningful, more understandable and more applicable (from a policy standpoint) than those achieved through conventional positivist approaches.

This article introduces the first version of a new, standardized data tool that can be used to test models of global income allocation, the Standardized Income Distribution Database (SIDD). It is based on a comprehensive collection of income distribution data compiled by the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU‐WIDER 2000). International and intertemporal inconsistencies in these data have historically limited its use. We estimate adjustment factors for different scopes of coverage, income definitions, and reference units which, when applied to the raw data, bring all data to a common standard based on national coverage, gross income, and household per capita inequality. Criterion validity checks confirm that these adjustments boost the correlation between measured income inequality and national social indicators. The SIDD is also clean, free of duplicates, and easy to access. The SIDD will be useful both to students reading income inequality and to those conducting broad cross‐national research on the relationship between income inequality and a range of important outcomes, such as health, criminality, and social support.