Emerging Countries and Trends in the World Trade Network: A Link Analysis Approach

The landscape in the world trade network has changed in last few decades. This paper analyses World Trade Network (WTN) from 1990 to 2016, using the trade data available at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) website and presents the evolution of key players in the network using link analysis properties. Link Analysis analyzes the link strength between nodes of a network to evaluate the properties of the network. The paper uses link analysis algorithm such as PageRank, hubs, and authority to evaluate the strength or importance of nodes in the World Trade Network. A higher PageRank represents higher import dependencies, higher authority scores of a country denotes its significance to import from other hub countries, and a higher hub score indicates a country’s significance to export their final product to other authority sectors. The findings show the emergence of Asian countries, especially China, as key players in the world.