%0 Journal Article
%@ 1932-6203
%A Caldarelli, Guido
%A Cristelli, Matthieu
%A Gabrielli, Andrea
%A Pietronero, Luciano
%A Scala, Antonio
%A Tacchella, Andrea
%D 2012
%F eprints:1422
%I Public Library of Science
%J PloS One
%N 10
%P e47278
%T A Network Analysis of Countries’ Export Flows: Firm Grounds for the Building Blocks of the Economy
%U http://eprints.imtlucca.it/1422/
%V 7
%X 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>