ABSTRACT
Social science research has been increasingly interested in the relationships between the environment and the economy. One critical research agenda – ecological unequal exchange – has explored the asymmetric flow of resources and unequal distribution of environmental harms across the world economy, particularly between high-income and low-income countries. However, research into the relationship between middle-income nations and low-income nations has been relatively minimal. This study, building off a world-systems taxonomy of core, semi-periphery, and periphery states, looks to extend research into the ecological dynamics captured in the trade among the non-core states, with regards to carbon emissions, over the course of 1996–2018. I find that patterns of ecological unequal exchange vary among the tiers of the semi-periphery – identified as the ‘Semi-Core,’ the ‘Regional Powers,’ and the ‘Secondary Regional States’ – suggesting the importance of tier-specific political-economic features in generating ecological unequal exchange outcomes.
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Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2024.2309407.
Additional information
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Hassan El Tinay
Hassan El Tinay is a current doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Boston College. His research focuses on the interaction between political economy and the anthropogenic drivers of climate change, with a particular interest in ecologically unequal exchange and macro-historical quantitative methods.