eprintid: 1422 rev_number: 11 eprint_status: archive userid: 6 dir: disk0/00/00/14/22 datestamp: 2012-10-22 07:27:04 lastmod: 2016-04-07 09:28:16 status_changed: 2012-10-22 07:27:04 type: article metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Caldarelli, Guido creators_name: Cristelli, Matthieu creators_name: Gabrielli, Andrea creators_name: Pietronero, Luciano creators_name: Scala, Antonio creators_name: Tacchella, Andrea creators_id: guido.caldarelli@imtlucca.it creators_id: creators_id: creators_id: creators_id: creators_id: title: A Network Analysis of Countries’ Export Flows: Firm Grounds for the Building Blocks of the Economy ispublished: pub subjects: HB subjects: QA subjects: QC divisions: EIC full_text_status: public abstract: 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.

date: 2012-10 date_type: published publication: PloS One volume: 7 number: 10 publisher: Public Library of Science pagerange: e47278 id_number: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047278 refereed: TRUE issn: 1932-6203 official_url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047278 projects: EC FET Open Project “FOC” No. 255987 citation: 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) document_url: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/1422/1/Plos_One_Caldarelli_etc_2012.pdf