TY  - JOUR
AV  - public
ID  - eprints1422
TI  - A Network Analysis of Countries? Export Flows: Firm Grounds for the Building Blocks of the Economy
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047278
IS  - 10
N2  - 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>
JF  - PloS One
SN  - 1932-6203
PB  - Public Library of Science
VL  - 7
Y1  - 2012/10//
A1  - Caldarelli, Guido
A1  - Cristelli, Matthieu
A1  - Gabrielli, Andrea
A1  - Pietronero, Luciano
A1  - Scala, Antonio
A1  - Tacchella, Andrea
ER  -