Re: question

I'm about to leave on holidays for 3 weeks, so I do not have much time. However, I hope this helps. When it comes to your doubts about Wallerstein's original work on world-systems, I guess that the best "introduction" to it - presenting all the essential features - is this:

A Summary of Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974)

You can find it at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/wallerstein.html , hope it helps you out. As for the empirical work and used indicators, the best places that I can think of for you to start looking (if you haven't done that yet, that is), are the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton (http://fbc.binghamton.edu/index.htm), especially the following sections of it: http://fbc.binghamton.edu/fbcintel.htm (REPORT ON AN INTELLECTUAL PROJECT: THE FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER, 1976-199), http://fbc.binghamton.edu/rwg.htm (RESEARCH WORKING GROUPS OF THE FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER), and http://fbc.binghamton.edu/papers.htm (Papers of the Fernand Braudel Center).

I expect some of the other member of the list to be of far greater assistance than me, given their years of experience both of world systems theory and empirical work on it. Nonetheless, hope these first few refernces will aid you in your research. If there is anything else I can do, please contact me.