People are the most important factors of economy and the primary carriers of social culture. Cross-border migration brings economic and cultural impacts to the origin and destination and is also a key to reflect the international relations of related countries. In fact, the migration relationships of countries are complex and multilateral, but most traditional migration models are bilateral. Network theories could provide a better description of global migration to show the structure and statistical characteristics more clearly. Based on the estimated migration data and disparity filter algorithm, the networks describing the global multilateral migration relationships have been extracted among 200 countries over fifty years. The results show that the global migration networks during 1960–2015 exhibit a clustering and disassortative feature, implying globalized and multipolarized changes of migration during these years. The networks were embed into a Poincaré disk, yielding a typical and hierarchical “core-periphery” structure, which is associated with angular density distribution, and has been used to describe the “multicentering” trend since 1990s. Analysis on correlation and evolution of communities indicates the stability of most communities, yet some structural changes still exist since 1990s, which reflect that the important historical events are contributable to regional and even global migration patterns.

In contrast to the rapid integration of the world economy, many regional trade agreements (RTAs) have also emerged since the early 1990s. This contradiction has encouraged scholars and policymakers to explore the true effects of RTAs, including both regional and global trade relationships. This paper defines synthesized trade resistance and decomposes it into natural and artificial factors. Here, we separate the influence of geographical distance, economic volume, and overall increase in transportation and labor costs and use the expectation maximization algorithm to optimize the parameters and quantify the trade purity indicator, which describes the true global trade environment and relationships among countries. This indicates that although global and most regional trade relations gradually deteriorated during the period 2007–2017, RTAs generate trade relations among members, especially contributing to the relative prosperity of European Union (EU) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. In addition, we apply the network to reflect the purity of the trade relations among countries. The effects of RTAs can be analyzed by comparing typical trade unions and trade communities, which are presented using an empirical network structure. This analysis shows that the community structure is quite consistent with some trade unions, and the representative RTAs constitute the core structure of international trade network. However, the role of trade unions has weakened, and multilateral trade liberalization has accelerated in the past decade. This means that more countries have recently tended to expand their trading partners outside of these unions rather than limit their trading activities to RTAs.

No abstract

In contrast to the rapid integration of the world economy, many regional trade agreements (RTAs) have also emerged since the early 1990s. This seeming contradiction has encouraged scholars and policy makers to explore the true effects of RTAs, including both regional and global trade relationships. This paper defines synthesized trade resistance and decomposes it into natural and artificial factors. Here, we separate the influence of geographical distance, economic volume, overall increases in transportation and labor costs and use the expectation maximization algorithm to optimize the parameters and quantify the trade purity indicator, which describes the true global trade environment and relationships among countries. This indicates that although global and most regional trade relations gradually deteriorated during the period 2007-2017, RTAs generate trade relations among members, especially contributing to the relative prosperity of EU and NAFTA countries. In addition, we apply the network to reflect the purity of the trade relations among countries. The effects of RTAs can be analyzed by comparing typical trade unions and trade communities, which are presented using an empirical network structure. This analysis shows that the community structure is quite consistent with some trade unions, and the representative RTAs constitute the core structure of international trade network. However, the role of trade unions has weakened, and multilateral trade liberalization has accelerated in the past decade. This means that more countries have recently tended to expand their trading partners outside of these unions rather than limit their trading activities to RTAs.

People are the most important factors of production and the primary carriers of social culture. In addition to the impacts on the origin and destination, the volume of cross-border migrants can reflect the relationship between two countries. In fact, the migration relationship of countries is complex and multilateral, and network theories could provide a better description and more clearly show the structure and statistical characteristics. Based on the estimated bilateral migration data and disparity filter algorithm, we extract the global migration networks describing the multilateral migration relationships between 200 countries over fifty years. The results show that the global migration network during 1960-2015 exhibits obvious clustering and a disassortative property and that it is experiencing globalized and multipolarized changes during these years. Moreover, the global migration network has a typical "core-periphery" structure, and we certify its hyperbolic geometry and embed the network into a Poincar disk, which could present the hierarchical structure of the global migration network and describe the status, role and evolution trends of different countries. Finally, we analyze the correlation and evolution of communities. The results show the stability of most communities, but there are still structural changes, such as the influence of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the Eurasian pattern, the intimacy between France and Africa, Canada's relative affinity between America and the British Commonwealth, and the combination of the countries around the Indian Ocean.