The evolution of China’s interregional coal trade network, 1997–2016

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive exploration and discussion of the evolution of China’s interregional coal trade from a continuous time series perspective. First, structure analysis shows that China’s coal trade network (CCTN) has a small-world phenomenon, indicating that a handful of regions own many coal trade partners and a marked majority of regions own a few. Then, we find that the betweenness centrality of the CCTN tends to move to southern regions from northern regions in terms of geographical distribution. Furthermore, according to the calculation by UCINET, the whole network can be clearly divided into 4 subgroups, and the structure of the subgroups indicates that the majority of regions tend to have trade relationships with geographically close regions. And finally, the CCTN is much less vulnerable overall than in the past. However, there is no change in the fact that the removal of only 10 bottleneck nodes can reduce the main cluster to a size representing less than 50% of the original network over the whole period observed, and this should be considered by policy makers.