Hubs and Authorities in the World Trade Network Using a Weighted HITS Algorithm

Abstract

We investigate the economic hubs and authorities of the world trade network (WTN) from to , an era of rapid economic globalization. Using a well-defined weighted hyperlink-induced topic search (HITS) algorithm, we can calculate the values of the weighted HITS hub and authority for each country in a conjugate way. In the context of the WTN, authority values are large for countries with significant imports from large hub countries, and hub values are large for countries with significant exports to high-authority countries. The United States was the largest economic authority in the WTN from to . The authority value of the United States has declined since , and China has now become the largest hub in the WTN. At the same time, China's authority value has grown as China is transforming itself from the “factory of the world” to the “market of the world.” European countries show a tendency to trade mostly within the European Union, which has decreased Europe's hub and authority values. Japan's authority value has increased slowly, while its hub value has declined. These changes are consistent with Japan's transition from being an export-driven economy in its high economic growth era in the latter half of the twentieth century to being a more mature, economically balanced nation.

Simulation of Gross Domestic Product in International Trade Networks: Linear Gravity Transportation Model

“…In the case of ITN, there are little differences among top countries' degrees. We introduce the preferentially selected network [6]-a simplified network produced from the original one, in which links with small contributions are removed using the following rule: For all nodes, we select the top n th weight links for both inflow and outflow and cut off all other links. In this simulation, we use the case of preferentially selected network, where n D 6.…”

“…The gravity transportation model (GTM) is known to be effective in examining a company's transaction networks [3,4]. The LGTM is a linearized form of the GTM and is a type of degree distribution model [5,6].…”

Clusters and communities in air traffic delay networks

“…Hubs and authorities were introduced for directed networks in the context of the Hypertext Induced Topics Search (HITS) algorithm [20], [21]. The key idea is that there are two types of important nodes in directed networks: hubs and authorities.…”

Google matrix of the world network of economic activities

“…We note that there has been a number of other investigations of the WTN reported in [18,19,20,21,22,23,24]. However, in this work we have the new important elements, developed in [12,13,15]: the analysis of PageRank and CheiRank probabilities corresponding to direct and inverted network flows and related to Import and Export; democratic treatment of countries combined with the contributions of sectors (or products) being proportional to their commercial exchange fractions.…”