What is it about?
The research on core-periphery structure of global trade from a complex-network perspective has shown that the world system is hierarchically organized into blocks and that countries play different roles in the world economy. Yet, little attention has been paid to investigating whether the sectoral international trade networks conform to a core-periphery structure, hence what is the role of different levels of processing in creating and maintaining structural inequality. This issue is of particular importance given the contemporary focus upon global production networks and reshaping of the international division of labor. With this in mind, we propose a model (LARDEG) from network science to reexamine old theories in economics, such as core-periphery structures in sectoral international trade networks and test whether the global value chains have changed structural positions in terms of the level of processing. Our algorithm naturally produces networks with hierarchically nested block structure obtained from an iterative decomposition of the network periphery such that each block represents a vertex set of a maximal size sub-graph existing at different levels.
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Why is it important?
The economic background of our model permitting a more accurate sorting of countries into structural positions and the general stability of results have provided for a more solid measurements than has hereto been possible.
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This page is a summary of: Core-periphery structure in sectoral international trade networks: A new approach to an old theory, PLoS ONE, April 2020, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229547.
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