[Music] in class we're going to discuss globalization as a political and economic phenomenon for a video I want us to think about it in terms of the state of international relations today we might think of the relationship among the nations of the world in terms of a core periphery and semi-periphery set these labels refer to the relative economic power that nations have with one another core nations are those on top they have the primary economic power they are able to export exploitation and import consumer goods what this means is that they are in the best position to send the hard dangerous or low paid jobs elsewhere while still reaping the rewards of those jobs the overall standard of living in these countries is fairly high current core countries include the United States Canada most Western European nations Australia New Zealand and Japan note that most g8 countries and several others are included in this list which brings me to the question to look up for next class which g8 country did I not include in that list and I've given you a little bit of hint on this slide by highlighting the flags of the nations that are part of the g8 to see if you can narrow it down from there so pause here go look that up which g8 country is not included in the list of core nations I just went through periphery countries are those that are on the bottom they are the most beholden to the core countries they typically have very weak worker and environmental protections they have some of the most hazardous or demeaning jobs and they export a high amount of product the overall standard of living in these countries tends to be fairly low current periphery nations include most African nations many Asian and Middle Eastern nations most of Central America and several South American nations note that on this map these are the countries that are listed in the green many have formed what is called the g77 this is a conglomeration of 77 of the poorest nations of the world similar to the g8 except on the other end of the spectrum and they have come together in an attempt to create collective unity and have some measure of power to determine their own destinies we might think of this in a way as a form of unionization among nations rather than among workers semi-periphery countries are somewhere in the middle they typically are industrializing with mostly capitalist driven economies their overall standard of living is on the rise though it's not typically as high as the more affluent core nations and they typically have a mix in terms of worker and environmental protections they also show a mix in terms of exploitation they are able to exploit others while in other ways they are themselves exploited now while they offer a fairly diverse array of economic opportunities to their citizens there is in semi-periphery nations a very large gap between rich and poor in a way theoretically they stabilize the world system by providing a sort of bridge between core and periphery countries in terms of overall overall global trade current semi-periphery nations which will be a little different than the color scheme on this map but it's close current semi-periphery nations include Mexico Brazil Argentina China Russia India Iran and Saudi Arabia South Africa and several South Pacific nations note that these trends are not necessarily uniform within a country just because the US for example has a high standard of living on the whole doesn't mean there isn't significant inequality within the country things we have been talking about over the last several weeks and just because one country is overall very impoverished such as a periphery nation doesn't mean that there aren't those within that country who are shall we say living live high on the hog now in our next class we will pick up with the concept of globalization which connects very directly to world system theory and we'll be thinking about it in a more theoretical light considering what it is how it works and what its ramifications are