“…The second aspect focuses on international trade. According to Liu, Xu, and Zhang (2020), the existing research has concentrated mainly on three topics: the evolution of trade demand or supply (Rana 2016), trade network structure (Liu, Wang, and Zhang 2018;Zhao et al 2020;Feng et al 2020) and the determinants of trade activities (Alderighi 2018). Unexpectedly, such studies have seldom analyzed the trade patterns of competitiveness and complementarity, which are defined as rivalry and collaboration, respectively, in terms of benefits from trade economic activity (Anna and Agnieszka 2016) and are essential for investigating trading activities (Thissen, Graaff, and Oort 2016).…”