DATA-MUNDO

Data in a World-Historical Perspective
DATA-MUNDO brings together data from various sources, structured both territorially and temporally, enabling analyses of the economy and the international system from a historical-global perspective.

“If in England a machine is invented that deprives countless workers in India and China of their bread and subverts the entire form of existence of those empires, such an invention becomes a historical-world fact; or one can demonstrate the historical-world significance of sugar and coffee in the 19th century by the fact that the absence of these products, resulting from the Napoleonic continental blockade, provoked the uprising of the Germans against Napoleon and was, therefore, the real basis of the glorious wars of liberation of 1813.”
— Karl Marx in The German Ideology

World-Historical Character of the Capitalist World-Economy

The capitalist world-economy is defined in terms of spatial and temporal phenomena.

• Spatially, it consists of different economic zones whose characteristics tend to change over time.
• Temporally, it is subject to the cyclical nature of long waves, which structurally transform into long-term patterns.

Purpose of the Application

• Provide alternative criteria to distinguish areas inside and outside the capitalist world-economy
• Characterize core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral areas
• Describe the movements of expansion and relative contraction of the world-economy, as well as periods of transition

Justification

• State borders do not necessarily correspond to the boundaries of economic activities
• Economic activities in the capitalist world-economy tend to be relational, occurring within and between states and simultaneously integrating different regions
• To quantitatively express both characteristics, national data are coded using quantitative methodologies, contributing to the discussion of World-Systems Analysis

Principles for Structuring the Database

• Characterize the dynamic boundaries of the capitalist world-economy
• Monitor the continuous change in the international division of labor
• Demonstrate the cyclical trends of the capitalist world-economy
• Gather a set of indicators on the forms of organization of the production process
• Estimate capital accumulation at the level of the capitalist world-economy
• Characterize the spatial distribution of the labor force in the capitalist world-economy over time