Functional trade patterns and their contributions to international photovoltaic trade revealed by network motifs

Abstract

Because of changing policy circumstances, international photovoltaic (PV) trade is increasingly complex with multi-pole trade cooperation., which makes it necessary to determine its trade mechanism taking local inter-cooperation as the perspective. Unlike the traditional topic of ‘what trade patterns are shown’, this work studies ‘how trade patterns work’. Therefore, functional trade patterns (FTPs), which refers to basic trade patterns that play functional roles in the evolution of international PV trade, is developed in this paper. Annual networks are established based on PV trade flows among countries from 2007 to 2016. Based on the detection results, FTPs’ functions on three scales of trade networks are studied: Global patterns, local patterns, and countries’ roles. We find that 1) having common trade targets and bilateral cooperation promotes the trade evolution; 2) PV trade transmissions are key to trade closeness, while bilateral or trilateral cooperation promotes trade scales; and 3) present circumstances of global PV policy provide opportunities for African, South American and Southeast Asian countries to be local importers, local transferors and local exporters respectively. Finally, a proposed model is valid to estimate potential PV trade flows. Our work is helpful for policymaking and trading strategies.