The authors motivate social capital arguments at the world-system level through the analysis of world-trade flows and nation status, 1965 to 1980, with specific attention to contextual changes in global trade and stratified effects on participation in trade within it. They generate measures of structural autonomy based on world-trade data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Index and incorporate these measures into robust regression models of the determinants of nation status. The authors find support for the overall positive effects of structural autonomy on nation status in 1965 and 1970 but find that these effects dissipate by 1980. They then use quantile regressions to find that only high-status countries experience significant returns on structural autonomy in any of the 3 observation years. The authors combine network and institutional perspectives on trade to argue that changes in the context of world trade between 1965 and 1980 affect the benefits that social capital can reap and for whom.
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