World-Economy Centrality and Carbon Dioxide Emissions: A New Look at the Position in the Capitalist World-System and Environmental Pollution

Abstract

With the ever-growing concern of climate change, much attention has been paid to the factors driving carbon dioxide emissions. Previous research in the World-Systems perspective has identified a relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and position in the world-economy. This study intends to build on the previous research by developing a new, more parsimonious indicator of World-System position based on Immanuel Wallerstein’s theoretical concepts of incorporation and core-periphery processes. The new World-System indicator is derived from the centrality measure in network analysis based on import data from the International Monetary Fund’s Direction of Trade Statistics. Based on the theoretical concepts of core-periphery processes, carbon dioxide emissions are predicted to rise based on the predominance of energy-intensive, high-technology, core processes within the nation. The results tend to demonstrate a strong relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and position in the world-economy, and the new World-System position indicator is more strongly related with carbon dioxide emissions than Gross Domestic Product per capita.

Unequal Carbon Exchanges: The Environmental and Economic Impacts of Iconic U.S. Consumption Items

“…Other countries, notably many of the Scandinavian ones, have high GDP per capita, but their coreness scores is middling. We note here that other studies have attained similar results (Van Rossem ; Prew ), and given that many Western European and Scandinavian countries are wealthy, yet holding small populations, such a finding is not too surprising: these countries’ knowledge‐based economies, which rely on a highly educated population, rather than on resource extraction or production and manufacturing.…”

“…Such an unequal exchange in terms of both wealth and emissions is in keeping with arguments that the wealthy core benefits economically whereas more‐peripheral, less economically developed countries experience larger proportions of emissions (Roberts and Parks ; Roberts et al. ; Prew ; Prell et al. ).…”

“…In calculating coreness, we first integrated the MRIO data set into one country‐by‐country trade matrix. In addition, because the coreness procedure requires inputting network data to be symmetric, we symmetrized our global trade matrix by adding the matrix to its transpose (see Prew [] and Clark [] for similar procedures).…”

China's ascent and Africa's environment

“…These studies use quantitative-statistical analyses, short time frames and focus strongly on deforestation and climate change (e.g. Burns et al, 2003;Roberts and Grimes, 2002;Roberts and Parks, 2007;Rice, 2007;Shandra et al, 2008;Jorgenson and Kick, 2003;Jorgenson and Clark, 2010;Prew, 2010). The two approaches converge in their focus on explaining environmental destruction by the nature of the world capitalist system and inequalities between dominant and peripheral states.…”

Residential Electricity Use Effects of Population in Kazakhstan

“…As previously noted, some earlier studies have examined this relationship in the oil-exporting economies of the CIS, including Kazakhstan. However, studies are either cross-sectional (York et al, 2003a;Knight, 2008;Kick and McKinney, 2014;Lamb et al, 2014;Mattos and Filippi, 2013), or panel studies (Fang and Miller, 2013;Martínez-Zarzoso, 2009;York and Rosa, 2012;Brizga et al, 2013;Jorgenson, 2011;Lankao et al, 2008;Grunewald and Martínez-Zarzoso, 2009a, 2009bPrew, 2010;Iwata and Okada, 2014;Martínez-Zarzoso and Maruotti, 2011) that investigate environmental issues rather than energy use. 4 Only Scarrow (2010), Liddle (2011), Fang et al (2012, Nouri et al (2012), Shafiei (2013), Hasanov et al (2016) studied the energy use impacts.…”