An International Trade Comparison of Two Supposedly Different Sectors

Abstract

According to modern international economics, and especially evolutionary economic geography, a country industry characteristics influence the structure of its international trade. Following this view, this chapter moves from the following basic research issue: if two sectors are very different according to market, economic and technological aspects, should we expect that its corresponding international trade networks are as well markedly different? Aerospace and Common Earth Materials seem quite different in those respects, and thus, they are good candidates to explore that research issue. Its comparison allowed to evidence and discuss some methodological problems in applying social network analysis, and especially in using it to compare different networks. In particular, it is underlined the difficulty to handle valued networks when value variance is very high, and to combine three groups of indicators: simple, hierarchy focused, and strictly topological. The comparative analysis employed 32 indicators either at network or sub-network level, like for core-periphery analysis, which indicate clear and marked diversity only in terms of hierarchical degree and topological aspects. A first conclusion is that the two examined trade networks are following a similar path and, excepted for few indicators, they seem to be rather similar even at a deeper structural level. Hence, one (or more) of three implications can be drawn: 1) the global value networks corresponding to the two sectors are not so markedly different; 2) they are substantially different but such a diversity does not produce a significant difference in terms of international trade networks; 3) there are some methodological problems that prevent differences to be evidence and require a more refined and modified comparison. A second conclusion is that trade patterns of both sectors are rather unstable.

Growing Inequality in the Coffee Global Value Chain: A Complex Network Assessment

“…On the other hand, after analyzing the international green coffee market through "the observatory of economic complexity" [50] it is possible to conclude that the market volume during the period studied has been constantly increasing and decreasing, finding a minimum in 2002 and a maximum in 2012, suffering a considerable general increase from the first years of the period until recent years. Throughout these years it has been observed how the importance of the different countries in the market has varied, as in the first years, the market was spread over a greater number of countries than in recent years.…”

“…Through tools such as complex networks, it is possible to understand how green coffee transactions take place between different countries in the world market reliably and more simply, in addition to seeing through their visualization many characteristics of the international green coffee market that only with the data would not be seen and would go unnoticed, such as that a country that does not grow coffee like Germany is a great marketer of this product. This type of analysis has already been carried out comparing different markets, for example by Basevi and Biggiero [50].…”

“…In our opinion, the use of complex network analysis for global visualization is a useful tool, since it allows a single image to see what the market for this commodity is like. Many authors support this idea and apply complex networks analysis to study International Trade networks of different commodities [50].…”

“…The UN Comtrade is a highly specialized database; with over 40 billion data records since 1962 is the largest depository of international trade data available publicly on the internet. Some related studies about international trade networks also used this database, see for instance [50].…”