Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA.
Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Catania, 95125, Catania, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2022 May 31;12(1):9086. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-12067-x.
Countries become global leaders by controlling international and domestic transactions connecting geographically dispersed production stages. We model global trade as a multi-layer network and study its power structure by investigating the tendency of eigenvector centrality to concentrate on a small fraction of countries, a phenomenon called localization transition. We show that the market underwent a significant drop in power concentration precisely in 2007 just before the global financial crisis. That year marked an inflection point at which new winners and losers emerged and a remarkable reversal of leading role took place between the two major economies, the US and China. We uncover the hierarchical structure of global trade and the contribution of individual industries to variations in countries' economic dominance. We also examine the crucial role that domestic trade played in leading China to overtake the US as the world's dominant trading nation. There is an important lesson that countries can draw on how to turn early signals of upcoming downturns into opportunities for growth. Our study shows that, despite the hardships they inflict, shocks to the economy can also be seen as strategic windows countries can seize to become leading nations and leapfrog other economies in a changing geopolitical landscape.
国家通过控制连接地理上分散的生产阶段的国际和国内交易成为全球领导者。我们将全球贸易建模为一个多层网络，并通过研究特征向量中心性集中在一小部分国家的趋势来研究其权力结构，这种现象称为本地化转变。我们表明，市场的权力集中程度在 2007 年出现了显著下降，就在全球金融危机之前。这一年标志着一个转折点，新的赢家和输家出现了，美国和中国这两个主要经济体之间的领导角色发生了显著逆转。我们揭示了全球贸易的层次结构以及个别行业对各国经济主导地位变化的贡献。我们还研究了国内贸易在引领中国超越美国成为世界主导贸易国方面所起的关键作用。各国可以吸取一个重要教训，即如何将即将到来的经济衰退的早期信号转化为增长的机会。我们的研究表明，尽管经济冲击带来了困难，但它们也可以被视为国家可以抓住的战略窗口，以成为领先国家，并在不断变化的地缘政治格局中超越其他经济体。
