ABSTRACT
Of the two principal groups of actors in the contemporary global economy, states and transnational corporations, states are significantly more diversified and their behaviour more complex. It is therefore necessary to analyse their characteristics in some detail to understand the varied ways in which they interact with the world-economy and shape the economic geography of their own territories. One identifiable subgroup, the industrialized state-socialist nations, the integration of which into the capitalist world-economy is only partial, is analysed separately in Chapter 9. In this chapter, the remainder are grouped into two sets: the Western liberal democracies (the industrialized capitalist nations), and less developed countries, the independent statehood of which is in most cases of recent origin. This division is obviously oversimplified, for states differ across a range of characteristics rather than fall unambiguously into discrete classes. But there are enough commonalities within each set to justify the classification.
