International Specialization Dynamics

2The Dynamics of International Industrial Specializations

2.1. Introduction

This chapter presents a new indicator of betweenness centrality, alternative to RWBC (see Chapter 1) directly inspired by Economic Dominance Theory (EDT). It makes it possible to introduce a measure of structural changes in countries within the multi-graph of international trade. Nodes can be interconnected by multiple links; the graph with a particular type of relationship between the nodes is referred to as “layer”. For example, from the multi-graph of international trade, we can isolate graphs relating to the flow of food products, electrical machinery and transport equipment. We measure the betweenness centrality of the country from the multi-graph and analyze the contribution of each layer to the centrality scores obtained by countries. Scores obtained by layer and by country reveal their comparative advantages. Finally, we isolate the historical developments of these “revealed comparative advantages” of countries in order to identify bifurcations that might have occurred during the period under study.

The tools are applied to the subgraph of 27 Member States of the European Union over the period 1993–2004, during which data are available for all 26 geographical areas constituting the Union (data from Belgium and Luxembourg have been merged. Compared to the previous chapter, data on the former USSR, former Czechoslovakia and former Yugoslavia have been broken up). The 12 years of study therefore ...