relation: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/1422/
title: A Network Analysis of Countries’ Export Flows: Firm Grounds for the Building Blocks of the Economy
creator: Caldarelli, Guido
creator: Cristelli, Matthieu
creator: Gabrielli, Andrea
creator: Pietronero, Luciano
creator: Scala, Antonio
creator: Tacchella, Andrea
subject: HB Economic Theory
subject: QA Mathematics
subject: QC Physics
description: 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.</p>
publisher: Public Library of Science
date: 2012-10
type: Article
type: PeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
language: en
rights: cc_by
identifier: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/1422/1/Plos_One_Caldarelli_etc_2012.pdf
identifier:   Caldarelli, Guido and Cristelli, Matthieu and Gabrielli, Andrea and Pietronero, Luciano and Scala, Antonio and Tacchella, Andrea  A Network Analysis of Countries’ Export Flows: Firm Grounds for the Building Blocks of the Economy.  PloS One, 7 (10).  e47278.  ISSN 1932-6203      (2012)  
relation: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047278
relation: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047278