Rede internacional de comércio e teoria de redes: uma análise das redes e dos principais agentes via capacidade de difusão

Abstract

Globalization has demanded the understanding of the causes and consequences of interactions and trade exchanges between countries within a process that involves economic integration, transfer of policies across borders, as well as knowledge exchanging, cultural stability, power relations and discourses within the development of human society (AL-RODHAN; STOUDMANN, 2006). In the context of international trade, with varied trade patterns and increasingly more dependent and complex systems, even at the lowest levels of the economy, the use of Network Theory analysis to explore these structures formed by world trade agents provides a relevant set of quantitative measurement tools capable of fully understanding the internal structure of these networks (HOSSU et al., 2009; DE BENEDICTS; TAJOLI, 2011; KAO, YANG; YUAN, 2015). Besides of that this research aims to analyze and understand how some countries behave in the global trade network from the perspective of the recently created Network Diffusion Capacity measure. Considering that these structures formed by international trade networks have a diffusive potential that depends on their topological geometry, the Network Diffusion Capacity measure (SCHIEBER et al., 2021) was used to quantify the capacity of the players to diffuse information in the trading network, considering its structural connectivity and some traits of the dynamical process regarding the trades between countries. The UN Comtrade database was used as a primary source, since it is the most comprehensive commercial database available, with more than one billion records of trading that uses the classification of products according to the Harmonized System codes (HS). The results of descriptive analyzes of the international trade network showed that the complexity of the systems has increased over the years, but the main agents and products remained, to a certain extent, constant. However, the results of the analyzes that used the Network Diffusion Capacity measure showed that being among the ten largest exporters of a certain product does put a country to figure among those ten largest influencers and disseminators of information throughout the network. The volume exported by a certain country is of great importance in the network, it is seen as one of the differentials of the Diffusion Capacity measure that adjusts the links of the trading networks. However, it is necessary to go beyond that and understand how the network behaves holistically. Moreover, when the volume of data becomes as informative as it is complex, it is wise to apply non-trivial measures in order to extract relevant and complete information. Thus, the results indicated that only with the Diffusion Capacity measure it was possible to verify which countries are more likely to diffuse information more efficiently that go beyond the first link in the network.