INTEGRATION, CATCHING-UP AND DEVELOPMENT CEILINGS: THE USABILITY AND EXPLANATORY CAPABILITY OF THE SEMI-PERIPHERY TERM IN THE ANALYSIS OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES’ DEVELOPMENT TRAJECTORIES

Abstract

There seems to be a lack of clarity regarding the growth potential of the new member countries and the conditions for releasing it. This article attempts to introduce, in order to further study the development prospects of the CEE countries, the treatment used by E. Wallerstein about semi-periphery countries and semi-periphery economies, i.e. the countries and economies that are located between the core and the periphery, and possess the features of both groups (more about it later on).4 This is not a very unequivocal or operational concept, which certainly needs further elaboration before using, but the approach proposed by Wallerstein has several attractive qualities. First, it concentrates attention on the external relations and dependencies of a country’s economy, its position and role in the world economy. This approach is essentially structuralist, and postulates the existence of long-term dependencies. For these two reasons its emphasis is somewhat different than that of the middle-income trap concept, which has been quite widely used so far.5 Both address the situation where the countries that do not belong among the wealthiest or poorest ones tend to experience a standstill of growth in a certain stage of development primarily due to the increasing cost of production. Yet the concept of the middle-income trap concentrates more on the domestic factors of the economy of the country under observation, while the semi-periphery concept focuses more on outside factors and dependencies.6 Secondly, the concept of semi-periphery countries considers that the relation between the core and the peripheries occurs in a geographic space and are, as a rule, long-term. This permits the set of instruments of geo-economics and geopolitics to be used to analyse these relations. As a rule the cores are dominant in the geographically closer peripheries and semi-peripheries. Thirdly, the developments of the CEE economies have so far been predominantly treated “in their own juice”, the development of some CEE countries has been compared only with other CEE countries—which ones passed the transition better, showed the fastest growth, achieved better cooperation with the EU core countries, etc. Analysis in the context of semi-periphery countries permits the span of the analysis to be effectively doubled to a global dimension, comparing the development of the CEE countries and their prospects not only with Southern European semi-periphery countries but, if so desired, with semi-periphery countries in South America. Of course, this would attract greater interest if it should appear that there are sufficient common features among the semi-periphery countries’ parameters, economic behaviour and problems they face.