Countries’ positions in the international global value networks: Centrality and economic performance

Abstract

The international exchange of goods and services is increasingly organised along global value chains in which the various production stages are carried out at many different locations all over the world. A country can be seen as holding a central position in global trade to the extent that it is involved in a large number of economic transactions with alternative potential suppliers and has a wide access to different important markets. However, the centrality of countries’ positions in the international production of goods and services may vary according to the specific stages of the production process that countries occupy. Here we adopt a network-based perspective, and propose a novel three-faceted measure of centrality that captures countries’ distinct roles at the upstream, midstream, and downstream stages of the international production process. Findings suggest that rankings of countries based on our measures of centrality vary across production stages. While emerging and developing countries tend to secure central positions at upstream and midstream production stages, high-income countries tend to exert prevailing roles at downstream stages. Moreover, rankings based on our measures differ from alternative rankings obtained from traditional measures of market power simply reflecting aggregate trade values. This is especially the case within more traditional industries, such as Textiles and Apparel, in which small and less developed countries can play relevant roles at various stages of the production process.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s41109-017-0041-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Unfolding the Complexity of the Global Value Chain: Strength and Entropy in the Single-Layer, Multiplex, and Multi-Layer International Trade Networks

“…International trade among countries can be investigated from different perspectives and at different levels of detail [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. Traditionally, a network-based perspective has been advocated to represent countries as nodes and economic transactions as directed edges connecting nodes [ 6 ].…”

“…Network perspectives have long been advocated to investigate international trade among countries [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], and to study several other economic systems, including the global economy of transnational credit and investments, supply chains and production markets [ 16 ]. The idea of representing the worldwide trade system as a complex network can be traced back to the 20th century [ 6 ], when it was used to describe the patterns of international transactions among countries before World War II.…”

Characterizing the Regional Structure in the United States: A County-based Analysis of Labor Market Centrality

“…While degree centrality is a measure of number of walks of length one that the node appears in, eigen centrality generalizes it to the number of walks of infinite length (Newman 2016). These centrality measures have been used to study many geographic networks such as transit systems (Derrible 2012), street networks (Agryzkov et al 2019;Kirkley et al 2018), knowledge networks (Maggioni and Uberti 2009), and global value chains (Cingolani, Panzarasa, and Tajoli 2017).…”

Fragility of a multilayer network of intranational supply chains

“…The inclusion of interlayer flows or couplings is crucial as they have been shown to enhance the propagation of shocks (Vespignani 2010 ). Multilayer networks built using MRIO data have recently been used to analyze international economic flows among countries (Cerina et al 2015 ; Cingolani et al 2017 ; del Río-Chanona et al 2017 ; Maluck and Donner 2015 ; Piccardi et al 2017 ; Xing et al 2017 ). This is to our knowledge the first application of multilayer networks to study shock propagation within intranational MRIO data.…”