A Network Analysis of Countries’ Export Flows: Firm Grounds for the Building Blocks of the Economy

Guido Caldarelli, Matthieu Cristelli, Andrea Gabrielli, Luciano Pietronero, Antonio Scala and Andrea Tacchella

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 10, 1-11

Abstract: In this paper we analyze the bipartite network of countries and products from UN data on country production. We define the country-country and product-product projected networks and introduce a novel method of filtering information based on elements’ similarity. As a result we find that country clustering reveals unexpected socio-geographic links among the most competing countries. On the same footings the products clustering can be efficiently used for a bottom-up classification of produced goods. Furthermore we mathematically reformulate the “reflections method” introduced by Hidalgo and Hausmann as a fixpoint problem; such formulation highlights some conceptual weaknesses of the approach. To overcome such an issue, we introduce an alternative methodology (based on biased Markov chains) that allows to rank countries in a conceptually consistent way. Our analysis uncovers a strong non-linear interaction between the diversification of a country and the ubiquity of its products, thus suggesting the possible need of moving towards more efficient and direct non-linear fixpoint algorithms to rank countries and products in the global market.

Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0047278

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047278

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