An Investigation of Interregional Trade Network Structures

2010

This paper uses the tools of network analysis to assess the different characteristics of world trade in different manufacturing industries. The structure of the trade networks is compared to understand to what extent the world market characteristics differ between sectors. We find that in some sectors the structure of trade flows gives rise to a dense, widespread network with many links, while in others we observe a centered network, organized around hubs that centrally coordinate the flows. The results indicate a pattern of network structures, showing a positive correlation between the goods' complexity and the network complexity, changing the extent of the relevant market and its structure across goods.

Networks and Spatial Economics, 2018

This paper introduces a multi-country multi-regional model that allows the evaluation of the effects of trade openness in the internal distribution of economic activity across regions within countries. Relying on the agglomeration and dispersion forces characterizing the analytical framework of the NEG/NTT literature, we consider a general model with two differentiated sectors in terms of preferences, technologies and transport costs, and that allows for any feasible world trade network topology where trade frictions are both transport and non-transport related (tariffs). As benchmark simulations we choose two opposed domestic network topologies characterizing a homogenous space and a heterogenous space. Our findings show that trade openness changes locational patterns in favor of better located regions with respect to the new world topology. These results entail important implications in terms of transport infrastructure (accessibility) and trade (commercial agreements) policies, as both are related when policy makers set regional equality goals.

International regional competitiveness recently was developed into smart, sustainable and inclusive growth objectives of the Europe 2020 policy programme, as envisaged for the cohesion policy reform after 2013 (EC, 2004). Currently, place-based development policies are proposed for future cohesion policy (Barca, 2009) and have taken the shape of smart specialisation strategies. These strategies are based on a systems way of thinking about innovation and growth (McCann and Ortega-Argilés, 2011) and place a large emphasis on regional network data and analysis. However, crucial economic data on trade between regions are noticeably missing from European regional databases. This paper, therefore, proposes a new methodology to determine interregional trade and present a unique data set on trade between 256 European NUTS2 regions, for the year 2000. The methodology stays close to a parameter-free approach as proposed by Simini et al. (2012), and deviates therefore from earlier methods base...

Regional Economic Development Research, 2021

With the rise and fall of the trade shares of different countries in the world, does the trade network structure change at the same time? Do the dynamics of countries’ positions differ in the evolution of trade network structure? Based on the latest world input-output database (WIOD), this paper illustrates the accounting models of international trade, and describes the dynamics of the global trade network structure and the countries’ positions. Research shows that China and the emerging countries developed faster than the developed countries during 2000-2014, and play important roles, not only in the trade shares, but also in global trade networks. The innovation of this study is that we present a systemic and explicit portrait of the global pattern of trade linkages between countries based on a set of social network analysis methods, and we find that the dynamic of linkage network is more violative than that of linkage flow.

Journal of economic integration, 2024

Since the 1980s, the expansion of international trade has exceeded the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Similarly, the number of Regional Trading Agreements (RTAs) 1) has risen from under 50 in the 1990s to more than 350 currently. Major players such as the US, the EU, and more recently China have increasingly used RTAs as a means of achieving economic integration. This is accompanied by the notable growth of China's imports and exports,

Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 1997

Recent research on international trade has highlighted the role of geography in influencing trade patterns. This article seeks to contextualise spatially the traditional gravity model used widely to examine patterns of international trade. It shows that since global trade is increasingly organised around regions, variations in regionalisation or geographical bias affect the levels of bilateral trade. When such biases are not taken into account, then estimation of the gravity trade model fails to discriminate between the relative spatial structures of trading regimes. The above argument is examined in the context of Asia-Pacific and Europe which are observed to have relatively different forms of regionalisation tendencies.

Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 2009

Applied Network Science

A common issue in trade network analysis is missing data, as some countries do not report trade flows. This paper explores what constitutes suitable data, how to deal with missing data, and demonstrates the results using key network measures. All-to-all potential connectivity of trade between countries is considered as a starting point, in contrast to the common approach of analyzing trade networks using only the countries that actually report trade flows. In order to fill the gap between the two approaches, a more complete dataset than just the dataset of trade between reporting countries is reconstructed and the robustness of studying this bigger dataset is examined. The difference between imputed and actual network adjacency matrices is evaluated based on several centrality measures. The results are illustrated using ten commodity groups from the United Nations Database, which demonstrate that under the proposed reconstruction procedure the ranks of the countries do not change si...

American Economic Review, 2005

2002

Abstract We present a trade model with a continuum of regions, transportation costs and agglomeration effects via production externalities. The model is consistent with evidence from estimations of the Gravity Equation. We analyze the effects of trade barriers and compare them to the effects of transportation costs. The results imply a sharp distinction between both, in terms of the specialization patterns and trade flows that they produce in equilibrium.