2017/29 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
Identifying the community structure of the international food-trade multi network |
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Sofia Torreggiani, Giuseppe Mangioni, Michael J. Puma and Giorgio Fagiolo |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
Food security, international trade, complex networks, communitystructure detection, multi-layer networks
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
Achieving international food security requires improved understanding
of how international trade networks connect countries around the world
through the import-export flows of food commodities. The properties of
food trade networks are still poorly documented, especially from a
multi-network perspective. In particular, nothing is known about the
community structure of food networks, which is key to understanding
how major disruptions or "shocks" would impact the global food
system. Here we find that the individual layers of this network have
densely connected trading groups, a consistent characteristic over the
period 2001 to 2011. We also fit econometric models to identify social,
economic and geographic factors explaining the probability that any
two countries are co-present in the same community. Our estimates
indicate that the probability of country pairs belonging to the same
food trade community depends more on geopolitical and economic factors
- such as geographical proximity and trade agreements co-membership -
than on country economic size and/or income. This is in sharp contrast
with what we know about bilateral-trade determinants and suggests that
food country communities behave in ways that can be very different from
their non-food counterparts.
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