What is peripheral country?

What Does peripheral country Mean

In order to know the meaning of the term peripheral country, it is necessary, first of all, to discover the etymological origin of the two words that give it its shape:

-Pais, on the one hand, derives from late Latin. Specifically, it emanates from “page (n) sis”, which can be translated as “inhabitant of a town” and which comes, in turn, from the noun “pagus”, which is synonymous with “town”.

-Peripheral, on the other hand, has its etymological origin in Greek. Yes, because it is the result of the sum of several lexical components of that language: the prefix “peri-”, which can be translated as “around”; the verb form "phero", which is equivalent to "I carry", and the suffix "-ikos", which is synonymous with "relative to".

The notion of peripheral country is used in the fields of politics , sociology and economics to refer to nations that are not part of the world center of power . This means that the peripheral countries are underdeveloped .

There are currents of thought that postulate the existence of a center-periphery duality at the international level. According to this perspective, the prevailing economic order is based on a hegemonic ( industrial ) center that sets the conditions for unequal exchange with the subordinate ( agricultural ) periphery . This imbalance prevents the development of peripheral countries.
The industrialized center, according to this theory , manages to increase its productivity faster than the underdeveloped periphery. The terms of trade, in this framework, deteriorate progressively, with a fall in the real prices of those primary products offered by peripheral countries.
It can be affirmed that a peripheral country, in short, is an underdeveloped or developing territory . In other words: peripheral countries are poor . Just as it is possible to divide the world between center and periphery, it is also possible to choose other classifications, such as first world and third world (peripheral countries, from this perspective, are part of the third world).
A peripheral country has an underdeveloped economy , lacks good infrastructure, and most of its inhabitants live in poverty. It is frequent that it does not have the means to exploit its natural resources in a sustainable way and that it needs the financial help of the powers to pay for its State or to assist the people who live in it.
In the same way, another series of characteristics in common that peripheral countries have or tend to have is established and they are the following:

-They have a government that turns out to be weak.

-Your society is made up of a small bourgeois part and a large peasant majority. Hence, there is a notable social inequality between the wealthiest classes and the rest of the citizenry.

-On numerous occasions they become the target of large multinationals. And it is that they find in these countries many resources as well as a very cheap labor force.

-They have very little industrialization.

Examples of peripheral countries, according to the latest studies carried out, are nations such as Guatemala, Honduras, Mozambique, Tanzania, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Morocco or Senegal, among others.