Debt Security Flows and the World Structure

Financialization has engendered a high degree of opacity in economic functioning, particularly within the largely uncharted territory of the globalized world economy. But, because of the relative novelty of financialization, not much is known about the topology of the global economic structure. Nor is there any significant understanding of the conditions and mechanisms through which global inequality may be amplified, sustained or perhaps even undermined by processes of financialization (Kus 2012). Therefore, a two pronged research question motivates this project. Most fundamentally, I ask: what is the global structure of international debt security flows (IDS)? I provide a number of descriptive network measures which illustrate increased density of the network overall. And more specifically, does this paper investigates whether this structure aligns with descriptions proffered by any particular theories of globalization. Specifically, I comparing three important theories of globalization: world polity, world systems, and regionalization. After running QAP tests on attribute data, I find that asset backed security flows tend to cluster within both region and stage of state development (an index) more than we would expect by chance, based on density. My results, therefore, provide preliminary support for both regionalization and world-systems theories in how ABS exchange is structured.