Published in
Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE, 10(7), p. e47278, 2012
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047278
Links
- ORCID
- ORCID
- Public Library of Science
- [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] | PDF
- [hdl.handle.net]
- [eprints.imtlucca.it] | PDF
- [arxiv.org] | PDF
- [europepmc.org] | PDF
- [www.researchgate.net] | PDF
- [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] | PDF
- [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] | PDF
- [arxiv.org] | PDF
Tools
A Network Analysis of Countries’ Export Flows: Firm Grounds for the Building Blocks of the Economy
,
Matthieu Cristelli,
Andrea Gabrielli,
Luciano Pietronero,
Antonio Scala ,
Andrea Tacchella
Full text: Download
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. © 2012 Caldarelli et al.