Based on social network analysis: Whether international trade network changed before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Abstract

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the international trade has been facing a severe impact. Based on the social network analysis method, this research models the world trade network during the six years from 2017 to 2022. The world trade network is made into a weighted directed adjacency matrix based on the data published by UN Comtrade database. The matrix also refers to the gravity model. With visualized data and images, this research makes a quantitative study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world trade network from the perspective of network analysis, centrality analysis and clustering coefficient. Apart from that, this research focuses on the international trade pattern and how it changes under the impact of the pandemic. According to this research, although the world trade network has not been deeply affected by the disease, there are some concealed tendency has been discovered, which may profoundly change the world pattern in the future.