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The final section provides a full discussion. why is convergence within the capitalist world-economy unlikely to occur? How can this arrangement be overcome? Does Chinas rise create new opportunities for the rest of the South? I hope you will find it interesting! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The myth of catch-up development: trends in core–periphery inequality from 1960 to 2023The conventional narrative in international development holds that poorer countries are “catching up” with richer countries through the process of capitalist growth. This paper assesses this claim ...www.tandfonline.com

In many cases, the US and its allies allowed these "new core" countries to use state-led industrial policy for development - an approach that was denied to the rest of the periphery. The East Asian "tigers" are a clear example. The final line by Amartya Sen here is a banger:

Now, a bit more about the "new core" countries. I mentioned above that they were integrated into the core for geopolitical reasons. We have a long discussion about this. This paragraph includes some striking points:

This improvement corresponds with the commodity boom of 2000–2011, when rising raw material prices, driven largely by demand in China, caused a surge in incomes for primary commodity exporters and enabled them to resist the more aggressive elements of the Washington Consensus.

Note that relative inequality reached its greatest extreme around 2000, and some improvement was achieved thereafter, albeit generally stalling in the 2010s.

...But in most cases, this will have to be implemented *against* the will of the core states, and therefore requires some kind of "delinking" from imperial power

Real development in the South requires gaining sovereign control over resources and production, using state-led industrial policy - that much is clear...

These results support the insights of world-systems scholars who have long argued that broad-based convergence is unlikely to occur within the existing structure of the capitalist world economy.

The vast majority of the periphery is *not* moving into the core. On the contrary, the share of the world population living in the periphery has increased from 80% to 86%. The core has become an increasingly exclusive faction of the world economy.

Because the "new core" states are so small, this does not affect the overall conclusions, as we can see in the chart above. Results for all classifications and all currency concepts are available online here, with interactive graphs: globalinequality.org/global-incom...

Global Income Inequality - Global Inequalityglobalinequality.org

But we also present results keeping the "new core" in the periphery (see the Appendix), keeping them in the core, and allowing them to switch year-by-year.

Note that the "new core" states create a methodological challenge because they switch categories over time. To deal with this, we analyse them separately.

But these "new core" countries are small, representing only 1.9% of the world population, and in most cases they were purposefully integrated into the core for geopolitical purposes during the Cold War and after (more on this below).

Eighteen developing countries joined the core during the period, including well-known cases like South Korea and Taiwan.

We also assessed countries individually. We found that 67-76% of peripheral countries had slower growth rates than the core over the assessed period, indicating increased relative inequality.

Crucially, we found that core–periphery inequality worsened *particularly* during the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, four of the seven peripheral regions experienced severe and prolonged economic contractions, while the core's income continued to grow.

This is a remarkable achievement. But the rise of China should not be overstated: its GDP per capita is currently just 22-38% of the core's—similar to Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, before neoliberalism.

China is the only region that has meaningfully improved its position, moving from the periphery to the semi-periphery.

Second, we looked at relative inequality. We found that the ratio of the periphery’s income to the core's has increased by at most 3 percentage points. And that progress is due entirely to China. Outside of China, the relative position of the periphery has deteriorated.

We started by looking at absolute inequality. We found that the income gap between the core and periphery has increased by 170–270%, depending on the currency concept. The core has captured 4–10x more income than the periphery over this period.