TY - JOUR
T1 - The struggle for existence in the world market ecosystem
AU - Vinã-Cervantes, Viviana
AU - Coscia, Michele
AU - Lambiotte, Renaud
PY - 2018/10/1
Y1 - 2018/10/1
N2 - The global trade system can be viewed as a dynamic ecosystem in which exporters struggle for resources: The markets in which they export. We can think that the aim of an exporter is to gain the entirety of a market share (say, car imports from the United States). This is similar to the objective of an organism in its attempt to monopolize a given subset of resources in an ecosystem. In this paper, we adopt a multilayer network approach to describe this struggle. We use longitudinal, multiplex data on trade relations, spanning several decades. We connect two countries with a directed link if the source country's appearance in a market correlates with the target country's disappearing, where a market is defined as a countryproduct combination in a given decade. Each market is a layer in the network. We show that, by analyzing the countries' network roles in each layer, we are able to classify them as out-competing, transitioning or displaced. This classification is a meaningful one: When testing the future export patterns of these countries, we show that out-competing countries have distinctly stronger growth rates than the other two classes.
AB - The global trade system can be viewed as a dynamic ecosystem in which exporters struggle for resources: The markets in which they export. We can think that the aim of an exporter is to gain the entirety of a market share (say, car imports from the United States). This is similar to the objective of an organism in its attempt to monopolize a given subset of resources in an ecosystem. In this paper, we adopt a multilayer network approach to describe this struggle. We use longitudinal, multiplex data on trade relations, spanning several decades. We connect two countries with a directed link if the source country's appearance in a market correlates with the target country's disappearing, where a market is defined as a countryproduct combination in a given decade. Each market is a layer in the network. We show that, by analyzing the countries' network roles in each layer, we are able to classify them as out-competing, transitioning or displaced. This classification is a meaningful one: When testing the future export patterns of these countries, we show that out-competing countries have distinctly stronger growth rates than the other two classes.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85054464008&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0203915
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0203915
M3 - Article
C2 - 30281627
AN - SCOPUS:85054464008
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 13
SP - e0203915
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 10
M1 - e0203915
ER -