Structure Of Global Trade Research Articles

Who is the core? Reveal the heterogeneity of global rare earth trade structure from the perspective of industrial chain

Most of the studies on rare earth trade are conducted within the framework of a single product, while the complex industrial structure of rare earth is easy to be neglected. It is still mysterious about the global trade structure and dynamics of rare earth, especially the heterogeneity of trade patterns, trade divisions and determinants. In this paper, with the help of an interdependence identification system, complex network method, GIS space technology and panel regression, the structure, dynamics, and determinants of the international trade network on rare earth are revealed based on industrial chain classification and limited data sources. The results indicate that the global rare earth trade is closely related to China's policy, and the downstream occupies the primary position in the international rare earth supply chain. China has already replaced the developed countries as the core node of the trade network of the whole rare earth industry chain, especially in the downstream field, and continuously promotes the growth and development of global trade community. The world has formed four trade centers, namely East Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, but the dominance of East Asia has been strengthened. The overall decline in global dependence on rare earth means that more and more countries have gained trade advantages, and China has changed from the supply type of the whole industrial chain to the coexistence of supply and demand. Finally, the paper reveals the significant heterogeneity in the determinants of global rare earth trade structure, the downstream has unique technology and relationship thresholds effect.

중고의류 무역 연결망 분석과 시사점

This study is designed to investigate the status and changes in the structure of the global trade of used clothing from a network perspective and to draw implications for the used clothing trade. Trade data for 2011, 2015, and 2019 of the top 30 countries is from the UN Comtrade database. HS Code 6309 is used to obtain cross-border trade data. The analysis results are as follows. The used clothing trade network is centered in the US, UK, Germany, Pakistan, Ghana, Turkey, Togo, and Benin. In 2015, Korea’s influence as an exporting country increased; in 2019, China’s influence as an exporting country increased. The Netherlands has been moving to the periphery since 2015. The UAE has grown into a core country since 2015. In addition, compared to 2011, the used clothing trade network expanded in density, average path length, and scale in 2015, while in 2019 it contracted slightly compared to 2015. This study analyzes the current status and changes in the global trade structure of used clothing by applying trade network analysis, and provides implications for the establishment of strategies for overseas expansion of used clothing exporting companies.

Special Feature on social, economic, and spatial impacts of COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey

This Special Feature investigates the social, economic, and spatial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey and highlights the factors differentiating Turkey from the other countries. The articles contributing to this Special Feature are classified into three main parts. The first group of articles addresses spatial implications of the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey with a specific focus on the place-based factors affecting the spread of the pandemic, the determinants of pandemic-induced changes in intracity mobility, and the use of social media to forecast commercial real estate figures during COVID-19. The second group of articles investigates the social and economic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and diversely affected economic sectors in Turkey. These articles analyze the vulnerability and resilience of regions and diversely affected economic sectors with a specific focus on the housing market that displays an opposite trend to international tendencies regarding transaction volumes and private rental housing prices. The third group of articles considers the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic from an international perspective. These articles analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international trade with a specific focus on exports and the fragility of the global trade structure and network in the framework of global value chains. Analyzing the impacts of COVID-19 from different perspectives, the articles in this Special Feature reveal the factors differentiating Turkey from the other countries and highlight the challenges.

Global supply and demand of medical goods in the fight against Covid-19: a network analysis

As global value chains have taken shape, the geographic concentration of production in specific centers or hubs to minimize production costs is an issue that has been raised following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The criticism typically highlights how the production capacity within these global value chains is insufficient to meet the global needs for medical equipment and devices in this type of crisis. This study uses complex network analysis to examine the global trade structure of surgical masks and medical ventilators and its general patterns. The findings of this study conducted between 2019 and 2020 show that this trade structure has complex network properties and a core-periphery structure. A comparative evaluation of the results from these 2 years also reveals the economic fragility of the ventilator trade network even if it is easier to adapt urgent conditions in mask trade. In addition, according to the network analysis and the authority centrality values for 2020 the fact that the highest-ranked countries for ventilator imports are almost exclusively developed countries suggests that the trade structure might also indicate a moral deterioration. In sum, the empirical findings confirm that the structure of the current global value chains will not be immune to supply shocks during emergencies such as a pandemic.

The rise and fall of countries in the global value chains

Countries become global leaders by controlling international and domestic transactions connecting geographically dispersed production stages. We model global trade as a multi-layer network and study its power structure by investigating the tendency of eigenvector centrality to concentrate on a small fraction of countries, a phenomenon called localization transition. We show that the market underwent a significant drop in power concentration precisely in 2007 just before the global financial crisis. That year marked an inflection point at which new winners and losers emerged and a remarkable reversal of leading role took place between the two major economies, the US and China. We uncover the hierarchical structure of global trade and the contribution of individual industries to variations in countries’ economic dominance. We also examine the crucial role that domestic trade played in leading China to overtake the US as the world’s dominant trading nation. There is an important lesson that countries can draw on how to turn early signals of upcoming downturns into opportunities for growth. Our study shows that, despite the hardships they inflict, shocks to the economy can also be seen as strategic windows countries can seize to become leading nations and leapfrog other economies in a changing geopolitical landscape.

From the United States to China? A trade perspective to reveal the structure and dynamics of global electronic‐telecommunications

AbstractDespite contributions, most of the studies on electronic‐telecommunications trade are conducted within the framework of a global value chain and mainly based on an enterprise‐level. The global trade structure and dynamics of electronic‐telecommunications are still mysterious. In this paper, by deriving trade data of electronic‐telecommunications between countries (regions) from the UN Comtrade Database, characteristics in product, space and network of the global electronic‐telecommunications trade from 2000 to 2017 are explored, and the factors influencing its evolution. The results indicate that telecommunications equipment is gradually replacing electronic integrated circuits, thus leading the development of global trade on electronic‐telecommunications. In space, the global import pattern of electronic‐telecommunications has always been a tri‐polar pattern dominated by Asia‐Pacific, Europe, and North America, while the geography of global electronic‐telecommunications export has undergone fundamental changes, most notably the rise of the East Asia region represented by Mainland China. The global trade center in electronic and communication products has changed from USA to China. In terms of network structure, the global electronic‐telecommunications trade network continues to expand, showing significant small‐world and core‐peripheral characteristics, and a more competitive multi‐centric core is observed. In addition, Quadratic Assignment Procedure analysis indicates that culture proximity, innovation differences, and manufacturing differences have a positive effect on the international trade, while geographical distance, economic gap, openness gap, trade gap, and infrastructure gap play negative roles.

Are We in a De-Globalization Process? The Evidence from Global Trade During 2007-2017.

Through the analysis of statistical data, some scholars believe that the globalization of trade is declining, and de‐globalization has become a trend, even since the financial crisis in 2008. However, the superficial decline of global trade volume cannot be taken as a corollary of the de‐globalization. It needs go deep into the structural analysis, and “globalization or de‐globalization” should be discussed by analyzing whether the global trade structure has changed. This paper finds that during 2007–2017, the global trade resistances are clearly classified, and trade resistance in the global community has increased significantly. Second, an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is applied to divide global trade relations into two categories: intimate trade relations, whose barriers are mainly related to geographical distance; and unfriendly trade relations with high artificial barriers. Third, the trade purity indicator (TPI) is introduced to describe the trade environment of countries, and its evolution indicates after the financial crisis and for quite a long time, the structure of global trade has not changed much. And it shows some deterioration trend and structural adjustment after 2015, which indicates an opportunity for the emergence of de‐globalization in such an international environment full of uncertainty and challenges.

Global wheat trade and Codex Alimentarius guidelines for deoxynivalenol: A mycotoxin common in wheat

Deoxynivalenol (DON), a mycotoxin produced by Fusarium species that infect cereal grains, including wheat, is a significant food safety concern because of its adverse gastrointestinal effects and potential immunotoxicity. In 2015, the Codex Alimentarius Commission of the United Nations set guidelines for maximum allowable DON in wheat and other cereal grains. In this analysis, we employ social network models to analyze global wheat trade patterns in the years before and after the Codex DON guidelines were enacted in 2015: each year from 2012 to 2018 inclusive. Global wheat trading patterns in these seven years all presented hybrid structures: clusters of countries by continent, but a core-periphery structure within each continental cluster. This means that wheat trade, unlike maize and pistachio trade as determined from previous studies, appears to be driven by geographic proximity rather than similarity in food safety regulations. We found no evidence that global wheat trading patterns between nations changed as a result of the Codex DON guidelines, which stands in contrast to our earlier analyses of how aflatoxin regulations affected both maize and pistachio trade worldwide. This may be because insufficient time has passed, or because a single unified DON guideline does not have the same effect as multiple different national-level aflatoxin regulations in changing world food trade. If the central nations in such a global trade structure do not move upon a new policy, it is unlikely that the policy will affect the overall structure of global wheat trade. Without a core-periphery structure and engaged nations in the center of world wheat trade adopting these guidelines, it may take more years yet for these guidelines to be widely adopted, and for populations worldwide to benefit from lower DON exposure in their diets.

Core-periphery structure in sectoral international trade networks: A new approach to an old theory.

The research on core-periphery structure of global trade from a complex-network perspective has shown that the world system is hierarchically organized into blocks and that countries play different roles in the world economy. Yet, little attention has been paid to investigating whether the sectoral international trade networks conform to a core-periphery structure, hence what is the role of different levels of processing in creating and maintaining structural inequality. This issue is of particular importance given the contemporary focus upon global production networks and reshaping of the international division of labor. With this in mind, we propose a model (LARDEG) from network science to reexamine old theories in economics, such as core-periphery structures in sectoral international trade networks and test whether the global value chains have changed structural positions in terms of the level of processing. The economic background of our model permitting a more accurate sorting of countries into structural positions and the general stability of results have provided for a more solid measurements than has hereto been possible. Our algorithm naturally produces networks with hierarchically nested block structure obtained from an iterative decomposition of the network periphery such that each block represents a vertex set of a maximal size sub-graph existing at different levels. The results not only lend support to the previous hierarchical model of the world-system (core, semi-periphery, and periphery) but also find that, depending on particular industry, the number of analytically identifiable blocks could be more than three. We show that ‘size effect’ is the one that prevails for core block membership at the first hierarchical level, while the GNI per capita is a much poorer proxy for the world-system status. Moreover, the patterns of blocks we label as the second- or third-level ‘core’ are strongly dependent on distance and geographical proximity. Overall, the various configurations of asymmetrical trade patterns between our blocks and the remarkably stable position of core countries at the top of structure clearly indicate that the rise of global production networks has actually restored a huge and unequal international division of labor splitting the world into ‘headquarter’ and ‘factory’ economies.

중국의 부가가치기준 무역 변화양상과 글로벌 생산네트워크에 미치는 영향

China, as a global factory, was able to import intermediate goods from various countries and produce and export final goods from the background of global division of production. However, as the share of value added arising in China’s final products has recently declined, the global production network is showing signs of change. Trade data is generally based on final goods, so it is not possible to analyze global production networks properly. But, when using value-added trade (TiVa) data enable to decomposed to understand the contribution to each part. This study analyzes the changes in China’s value-added trade using the 2005 and 2015 data provided by the OECD. According to the value-added trade analysis, China’s share of the added value of final goods and intermediate goods in 2015 decreased compared to 2005, indicating that China’s position as a global factory has changed. However, the Chinese government’s efforts to reorganize its industrial structure into a high-tech industry have not been visualized, since the value added of final goods is higher than that of intermediate goods. In the case of the high-tech industry, the share of value added in China has decreased, while the share of value added in foreign countries is increasing. The rapid development of technology and the strengthening of protectionism leads to the need to continuously conduct research utilizing various data and methodologies for understanding the changes in global trade structure.

International trade, development traps, and the core-periphery structure of income inequality

Research on economic complexity has shown that a country’s type of exports conditions its future path of economic diversification and economic growth. Yet little emphasis has been put on the inequality associated with the types of products traded between countries and different regions of the world. Here we analyze the income inequality associated with the imports and exports of 116 countries in the period from 1970 to 2010. Our analysis shows that methods from network science and visual complexity research can help to reevaluate old theories in economics, such as core-periphery structures in international trade or structural development traps. Our results illustrate that the core-periphery structure of global trade affects not only the income inequality between countries, but also the income inequality within countries. Moreover, they reveal the structural constraints that developing and emerging economies face in promoting inclusive growth and benchmark their productive transformations with cases of successful catching up and developed economies. The results show that countries, such as South Korea or Germany, have benefited from outsourcing high inequality products. In contrast, some middle-income countries, such as Brazil or South Africa, face structural development constraints consisting of a large average distance of their export products to low inequality products and a “gravitational force” towards high inequality products. Finally, developing economies, such as Nicaragua or Sri Lanka face a double development trap for inclusive growth, as their economies depend on both a large share of high inequality exports and imports.

International Trade, Development Traps, and the Core-Periphery Structure of Income Inequality

Research on economic complexity has shown that a country’s type of exports conditions its future path of economic diversification and economic growth. Yet little emphasis has been put on the inequality associated with the types of products traded between countries and different regions of the world. Here we analyze the income inequality associated with the imports and exports of 116 countries in the period from 1970 to 2010. Our analysis shows that methods from network science and visual complexity research can help to reevaluate old theories in economics, such as core-periphery structures in international trade or structural development traps. Our results illustrate that the core-periphery structure of global trade affects not only the income inequality between countries, but also the income inequality within countries. Moreover, they reveal the structural constraints that developing and emerging economies face in promoting inclusive growth and benchmark their productive transformations with cases of successful catching up and developed economies. The results show that countries, such as South Korea or Germany, have benefited from outsourcing high inequality products. In contrast, some middle-income countries, such as Brazil or South Africa, face structural development constraints consisting of a large average distance of their export products to low inequality products and a “gravitational force” towards high inequality products. Finally, developing economies, such as Nicaragua or Sri Lanka face a double development trap for inclusive growth, as their economies depend on both a large share of high inequality exports and imports.

Многополярное замедление и оживление мировой торговли

We conduct a statistical study of the global trade slowdown relative to industrial production after the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the revival of the global trade in 2017. We aim to decompose the overall effect by geographical and commodity dimensions, that is, to determine the contribution of regions, major countries and aggregated commodity groups to the global trade slowdown and revival. Calculation scheme implies the two-way analysis, both from the demand and the supply side (imports and exports, respectively), and relies on the customs data. The focus on merchandise trade is confirmed by the fact that the growth rates of world imports and exports in constant prices for services decreased much less after the crisis of 2008-2009 than for goods. We analyze the dynamics of world trade relative to the dynamicsof industrial production, not GDP, due to the very high volatility of trade to GDP. The data comes from the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, WTO, World Bank, OECD, FAO andthe Chatham House Resource Trade Database. The key feature of the proposed scheme is aligning data on international trade growth for largest countries from different sources with CPB data for the world as a whole.The results of the study show that the slowdown in global exports was largely associated with emerging economies of Asia (and, primarily, China), Japan, Germany and the US, while the slowdown in global imports reflected the drop in demand in China and other emerging economies of Asia, the Euro Area, Russia and Brazil. The revival of global exports was driven by China,Japan, Netherlands, South Korea and Mexico, and the revival of world imports boils down to the demand growth in China, India and Russia. Unlike the global trade slowdown, the revival of the world trade was critically concentrated in emerging countries, while the Euro Area has practically not experienced the revival. An important role in the global trade slowdown was played by China and its reorientation to the domestic market after the crisis of 2008-2009. In terms of commodity structure of global trade, the slowdown was almost entirely associated with non-resource goods.The results can be used to refine the forecasts of the global merchandise trade growth by accounting for the contribution of the major countries more accurately.

Carbon policy and the structure of global trade

AbstractAlternative perspectives on the structure of international trade have important implications for the evaluation of climate policy. In this paper, we assess climate policy in the context of three important alternative trade formulations. First is a Heckscher‐Ohlin model based on trade in homogeneous products, which establishes the traditional neoclassical view on comparative advantage. Second is an Armington model based on regionally differentiated goods, which is a popular specification for numerical simulations of trade policy. Third is a Melitz model based on monopolistic competition and firm heterogeneity. This heterogeneous‐firms framework is adopted in many contemporary theoretic and empirical investigations in international trade. As we show in this paper, the three alternative trade formulations have important implications for the assessment of climate policy with respect to competitive effects for energy‐intensive production (and hence carbon leakage) as well as the transmission of policy burdens across countries.

The New Resilience of Emerging and Developing Countries: Systemic Interlocking, Currency Swaps and Geoeconomics

AbstractThe vulnerability/resilience nexus that defined the interaction between advanced and developing economies in the post‐WWII era is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Yet, most of the debate in the current literature is focusing on the structural constraints faced by the emerging and developing countries (EDCs) and the lack of changes in the formal structures of global economic governance. This article challenges this literature and its conclusions by focusing on the new conditions of systemic interlocking between advanced and emerging economies, and by analysing how large EDCs have built and are strengthening their economic resilience. We find that a significant redistribution of ‘policy space’ between advanced and emerging economies have taken place in the global economy. We also find that a number of seemingly technical currency swap agreements among EDCs have set in motion changes in the very structure of global trade and finance. These developments do not signify the end of EDCs’ vulnerability towards advanced economies. They signify however that the economic and geoeconomic implications of this vulnerability have changed in ways that constrain the options available to advanced economies and pose new challenges for the post‐WWII economic order.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) Enigma

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is the latest addition to an existing block of international financial institutions with the objective of providing infrastructural developmental funding to member nations. Incumbent players including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) are all dominated by countries such as the United States for the Western countries in the IMF and World Bank and Japan for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in the APAC region. The genesis of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has been met with mixed reactions by different audiences across the globe, due to the founding nation’s (People’s Republic of China) international perception in the zeitgeist. Are the optimism premature or such skepticism unfounded and bias?To assess the pros and cons of a new international financial institution led by China (short for People’s Republic of China), we first look at the overall macro landscape in this environment. The United States has been leading the pact in the IMF and the World Bank, being a dominant member in both institutions since inception. The IMF was created as a result of the signing of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, and officially came into existence in 1945 with 29 member nations. Armed with the mission of restructuring the international payment system, member nations contribute funds to a pool through a quota system from which countries with payment imbalances can borrow. The IMF is headquartered in Washington DC, signifying The United States’ prominence in this organization. Currently, the IMF has 188 member countries on their roster. The World Bank is the international financing arm of the United Nations, as part of the United Nations Development Group, provides loans to developing countries for capital programs and trades facilitation. The World Bank and the IMF share the same origin in the sense they both originated as a result of the Bretton Woods Conference and they are both headquartered in Washington DC. The United States is the most powerful member for the World Bank, just as in the IMF. On the other end of the global geo-political spectrum, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) was established in 1966 as a regional development bank with headquarter in the Philippines, to facilitate economic development in Asia. Closely modeled after the World Bank, with admitted members of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for APAC, the ADB maintains strong and close ties with the United States with Japan leading the pact in the APAC region.Given the fact that all incumbent international financial institutions having an uneven distribution of influence, specifically referring to the United States and allies monopolizing the landscape, shaping policies that are geo-politically favoring the dominant members and neglecting a representation of influences that are not of your status quo, would it make sense for China to step up in today’s global platform and exert appropriate level of assertion in the APAC region? For lack of better terms, the global trade structure is currently run by the United States in the Americas and big part of Europe, the United States and the United Kingdoms in the greater Europe and the Middle East, last but not least, the United States and Japan in the Far East. How equitable this dynamic can present and how sustainable this model will be, given the ever-changing eco-political circumstances in the world?

Spatial–temporal variations of embodied carbon emission in global trade flows: 41 economies and 35 sectors

The spatial–temporal variations of embodied carbon emissions in international trade at global scope are still unclear. This paper studies the variations of outflows and inflows of embodied carbon emissions at a disaggregated 35 sector level of 41 countries and regions, and an integrated world input–output model is employed. It also examines what would happen if there were no international trade flows in China, USA and Finland, the representatives of three different levels of the global balance of embodied carbon. We find the following: (1) Embodied carbon in global trade increases at about 3 % per year since 1995 World Trade Organization was founded, and East Asia tend to burden more from the net increase in the balance of embodied carbon. (2) China’s export has the largest and increasing outflow of carbon burden, USA’s import the largest and increasing inflow of carbon burden, and Finland’s export and import the decreasing carbon burden. (3) The global trade structure tends to be not so much carbon intensive. BRIIAT (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, Australia and Turkey) has the largest embodied carbon intensity in export (about 7.35 kg/$) while NAFTA (USA, Canada and Mexico) the largest embodied carbon intensity in import (about 10.32 kg/$). (4) There existed some inclination of embodied carbon flows including neighbor-centered outflows and country-centered inflows.

The evolving structure of global trade

The evolving structure of global trade

The evolving structure of global trade

The evolving structure of global trade

US Trade Deficits and Sino-US Relations

American politicians and policy makers have blamed China's exchange rate for the large US trade deficits. This paper explains why the USA treats its trade deficits with China as a security issue that have become a source of friction in Sino-US relations. The essay argues that this friction is a useful deflection from the politically difficult policy action needed to remedy the US economy and cannot easily be removed by the Chinese side alone. The structure of global trade and the reality of China's political economy, which forces Chinese leaders to develop policies for a “harmonious society” in the face of growing inequality also makes it difficult for China to respond positively to US pressure on the exchange rate.