Abstract
We analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the trade of products between countries. With this aim, using the United Nations Comtrade database, we perform a Google matrix analysis of the multiproduct World Trade Network (WTN) for the years 2018–2020, comprising the emergence of the COVID-19 as a global pandemic. The applied algorithms—PageRank, CheiRank and the reduced Google matrix—take into account the multiplicity of the WTN links, providing new insights into international trade compared to the usual import–export analysis. These complex networks analysis algorithms establish new rankings and trade balances of countries and products considering all countries on equal grounds, independent of their wealth, and every product on the basis of its relative exchanged volumes. In comparison with the pre-COVID-19 period, significant changes in these metrics occurred for the year 2020, highlighting a major rewiring of the international trade flows induced by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. We define a new PageRank–CheiRank product trade balance, either export or import-oriented, which is significantly perturbed by the pandemic.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic produced an enormous impact on human society with multiple health, social and economic effects [1]
The top 20 countries according to the PageRank, CheiRank, ImportRank and ExportRank are given in Figure 1 for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020
We presented its Google matrix analysis based on the PageRank algorithm [14,15] and other extended algorithms described in [25,26,28,30,31]
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic produced an enormous impact on human society with multiple health, social and economic effects [1]. It is important to analyze how the trade relations between the countries are structurally affected by the pandemic With this aim, we perform a Google matrix analysis of the World Trade Network (WTN) constructed from the UN Comtrade database [13] for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020. The REGOMAX method developed in [28,30,31] allows us to highlight interdependencies between specific products and countries For all these reasons, our global Google matrix analysis, including the REGOMAX algorithm, allows us to obtain a much deeper characterization of the impact of COVID-19 on the WTN.
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