Measuring Countries Centrality and the Trade Integration Using a Network Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46661/revmetodoscuanteconempresa.2791Keywords:
centralidad, mapas de estructura de comercio, heterogeneidad, cohesión, balance de comercio intra-industrial, centrality, trade structure maps, heterogeneity, cohesion, intra-industry trade balanceAbstract
Most papers which study the world trade network use indicators that suffer from an absence of economic content. Understanding this problem, we propose an alternative methodology to describe the international trade using a network perspective, but recovering the economic interpretation. The proposal consists in: estimating countries' centrality using indicators with economic interpretation; building trade structure networks and maps as alternatives to conventional visualizations; and estimating indicators to evaluate the strength of trade integration. We apply the methodology to information for 145 countries from 1992 to 2015, finding that our indicators identify the potentially most influential countries on international trade, possible core-periphery structures, a heterogeneous centrality distribution (always concentrated in few countries), and groups of different strength on its trade integration. All the results seem adequate in its description of trade economic-complexity, suggesting that the proposed methodology would be a valid tool to bring some economic sense to the international trade studied from a network perspective.
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