Wang Xibo, Ge Jianping, Wei Wendong, Li Hanshi, Wu Chen, Zhu Ge
The State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.
School of Humanities and Economic Management, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Beijing, 100083, China.
PLoS One. 2016 May 3;11(5):e0154575. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0154575. eCollection 2016.
Rare earths (RE) are critical materials in many high-technology products. Due to the uneven distribution and important functions for industrial development, most countries import RE from a handful of suppliers that are rich in RE, such as China. However, because of the rapid growth of RE exploitation and pollution of the mining and production process, some of the main suppliers have gradually tended to reduce the RE production and exports. Especially in the last decade, international RE trade has been changing in the trade community and trade volume. Based on complex network theory, we built an unweighted and weighted network to explore the evolution of the communities and identify the role of the major countries in the RE trade. The results show that an international RE trade network was dispersed and unstable because of the existence of five to nine trade communities in the unweighted network and four to eight trade communities in the weighted network in the past 13 years. Moreover, trade groups formed due to the great influence of geopolitical relations. China was often associated with the South America and African countries in the same trade group. In addition, Japan, China, the United States, and Germany had the largest impacts on international RE trade from 2002 to 2014. Last, some policy suggestions were highlighted according to the results.
稀土是许多高科技产品中的关键材料。由于其分布不均且对产业发展具有重要作用，大多数国家从少数稀土资源丰富的供应商（如中国）进口稀土。然而，由于稀土开采的快速增长以及采矿和生产过程中的污染问题，一些主要供应商已逐渐倾向于减少稀土生产和出口。特别是在过去十年中，国际稀土贸易在贸易群体和贸易量方面一直在发生变化。基于复杂网络理论，我们构建了一个无权网络和加权网络，以探索贸易群体的演变并确定主要国家在稀土贸易中的作用。结果表明，在过去13年中，由于无权网络中存在五到九个贸易群体，加权网络中存在四到八个贸易群体，国际稀土贸易网络分散且不稳定。此外，由于地缘政治关系的重大影响形成了贸易集团。中国经常与南美洲和非洲国家在同一贸易集团中。此外，2002年至2014年期间，日本、中国、美国和德国对国际稀土贸易的影响最大。最后，根据结果突出了一些政策建议。
