2.1 Introduction

If we were to look at the world’s economic history since 1900, we find several formalities of economic zoning. Many of them emerged, evolved, climaxed and disappeared or morphed into other zones of a different kind. General their lives have been relatively short partly because the world economy and its technological and political foundation undergo the transformation from time to time.

Until about the middle of the century, say 1945, the global economy was split between the economics of the colonial power or their familial allies, claiming a special, relationship, on the one side and the colonial world on the other. There were some exceptions to the rule which can be discussed separately.

Note for crowd-sourced addition to the Barometer: The colonial economic zoning can be an interesting economic space in history. We will take up this subject again in the chapter as part of modern European Colonialism as a Civilization category.

The Second half of the 20^th Century saw the emergence of several economic zoning frameworks. The need for them emerged from both segments of the preceding zoning, the colonial power zone and colonized populations zone. In the colonial power zone, two of those zoning schemes gained currency, the European Union as an organization beginning as a Coal and steal community comprising four national states and evolving into the European Union (EU) which continues to thrive, increasingly as a hybrid between economic zoning and civilizational zoning. The second zoning framework which emerged during that toroid was a concept more than an organization. It became known as the North-South economic zone, partly to be distinguished from the East-West Politico-Military Zoning representing the cold war at the time.

The Colonial population economic zone, where nearly 90% of the population of the world resided, represented a smaller, less than 50% of the Global Gross National Income. During the Colonial period this zone comprised a handful of political units, British Colonies, French Colonies, Dutch and Belgium, Iberian Spanish and Portuguese colonies. As colonialism receded and their huge population were split into numerous national state units, the formerly colonially integrated economies struggled to form new national unions for purposes of coping with the breakdown of the colonial regional economics from which they had fragmented. This led to a host of structures for regional economic unions in different parts of Africa and Asia as well as Latin America and the Caribbean. Most of such attempts were not successful fairly because the colonial age economic zoning was not only regional but an integral hole which tied together and economy of the colonial power and the economy of the colonized people. In retrospect, this because known as the centre-periphery economic framework, the centre referring to the respective colonial power and the periphery to its colonized subjects.

The period between 1950-1970 produced many interesting ideas and experiments in the field of economic zoning of the world. Among them was the formation of UNCTAD or the Group of 77. It originally comprised 77 of the new nation-states of the ‘Economic South’ of the world. It was formed under the umbrella of the United Nations, as was reflected in its formal name, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The composition of UNCTAD cut across the East-West Politico- military cold war divide of the time, at its membership, came from both the camp of the West and the camp of the East. It would be appropriate to not forget the word “camp” referring to the camp of the West and camp of the East. The word ‘West’ referend to Western Europe and its Atlantic shore across the ocean, and the East referred to the East, Europe was inclusive of, as it was, Russia. The ‘Camps’ of either of the two were neither restricted to be in Europe nor were they geographically restricted to be in the Eastern and Western hemispheres on either side of the equator. The “Camps’ were globally disposed of. Moreover, beyond any economic zoning, a new framework of the civilization of colonialism was emerging, this compressed Western Liberal arm of the Colonial civilization on the one hand and is Soviet arm on the other. These two arms or sects continue to live as civilizational sub-sets of the civilization of modernity. We shall take that up in chapter 4 dealing with the civilizational zoning of the world.

As we enter the 1970s, we witness the emergence of a new globalized framework pegged around commodities and raw materials required for the economy of the industrial age and associated lifestyle. The most important of there was oil and gas, the energy behind industrialization. Thus in the early 1970s, we see the emergence of an economic zone for the sellers of energy and a zone for the buyers of Energy, with OPEC representing the sellers and the International Energy Agency (IEA) representing the buyer. The membership and the associates of the two zones of energy were independent of the former frameworks of economic zoning, although OPEC was heavily tilted towards countries of the so-called south, and the reverse was true of IEA. This freedom from previous frameworks became more pronounced over the next few decades.

During the same period, the 1970s, we witness economic zoning between labour exporting nations and Labor importing nations. But most importantly a distraction began to emerge between the industrial age economics and the post-industrial age economies. There was a group of countries which benefited from this new trend, a group whose short-term interests were served possibly at the cost of long-term interest and a third group which was side-stepped in the process of this transformation. If one was to look at 2020 data. This three-tiered framework to stratify the world represents the most important economic zoning of the current times. The countries which benefited from the new technological transformation constitute the group which we, in this Barometer, have turned as the tier two of the Global Economy. They constitute twelve countries dispersed on all continents of the world. They have been loosely referred to as the emerging economies of the world. They forced their way onto global economic decision-making by activating the G20 in 2007. Then there is the Tier One of the Global Economy. They constitute 31 Countries concentrated in Western Europe and North America. One of their members, Japan, is in Asia, as an exception. These are nearly all post-industrial economies. Their economies made remarkable progress during the last thirty years alongside a weakening of their long-term weight in the global economy. Finally, there is a Tier Three of the Global economy, constituting 112 countries mostly in Afro Asia and Latin America, which were side-stepped in this new economic transformation. These data and their historical trends have been derived from the G & G Global Barometer in a user finally moods.

The relevance of the G & G Global Barometer for teaching and research on the Economic Zoning of the world

As we have witnessed in the above introductory discussion, the analysis of global economic zoning frameworks requires quite intricate empirical data on the economic behaviour of national economies and their populations or citizens. Because of rapid changes in the underlying fundamentals of economic activity, economic information needs to be contextualized in the space of ‘time’. The G & G Global Barometer is an attempt to juxtapose or blend sources of Power, the economy being one, spaces of power, in geographically contiguous or non-contiguous zoning and zoning of time, or trending the data over time periods. This triangular ‘inter-penetration’ or tri-angulation is provided for in the Global Barometer.

Easy access to such measurable data, in our view, opens up the opportunity for what we consider to be a more profound diabetic across sources, spaces and time. We shall keep returning to our theme of giving access to the measurable dynamics of power so that our dialectics on power can exercise its freedom to go beyond what is conveniently measurable. Many of the debates over the period we discuss in our introduction to this chapter are at their core about questions of ethics and community, wise knowledge might rest in learning how to discuss and empathise beyond learning how to measure. Thus while the barometer deals with the measurable its intent in teaching and research is to go beyond it.

Closing the section on introducing the concept of Economic zoning as a space of power, we move on to the section on examples. These examples will demonstrate the potential of the Barometer to provide answers to empirical questions which blend economy as a source of power displaying itself over multiple spaces of power across several zones of time. The zone of time is subject to whose elaboration we shall wait for until we reach part three of this short book.