Competitive Conditions in Global Value Chain Networks: An Assessment Using Entropy and Network Analysis

Evaluation and impact factors of international competitiveness of China's cobalt industry from the perspective of trade networks

In recent years, with the development of the new energy industry, the demand for cobalt as a raw material for power batteries has been increasing. However, China itself has a shortage of cobalt resources. Therefore, overcoming poor resource conditions and enhancing the international competitiveness of the cobalt industry have become urgent issues. This paper is based on global trade data on cobalt resources from 2007 to 2020. A panel regression model is constructed from the perspective of trade networks, and Entropy-Topsis is used to construct a comprehensive evaluation index system for the international competitiveness of critical nonferrous metals. This study empirically examines the impact of the trade network characteristics of cobalt resources on international competitiveness, assigns practical significance to trade network characteristic indicators, and analyses the overall competitiveness changes in the global cobalt industry chain and its upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors. The research findings reveal the following key points: (1) In recent years, the competitive focus of the cobalt industry chain in various countries has shifted from upstream and midstream to midstream and downstream, with increasingly fierce trade competition downstream, gradually tilting toward countries such as South Korea, Japan, and China. (2) Cobalt trade competition, which was initially characterized by competition among multiple countries, has gradually become more centralized and stable, with differences in the competitiveness of various countries occurring at different stages of the cobalt industry chain. (3) Network centrality and network heterogeneity both have a significant promoting effect on the international competitiveness of the industry, while network connectivity has a significant inhibitory effect on the improvement of international competitiveness.On this basis, the study also suggests some policy implications. The purpose of the study is to enhance the international competitiveness of China's cobalt industry from a trade perspective and to investigate the developments of cobalt trade between China and the rest of the world.

Communities in world input-output network: Robustness and rankings

We introduce a method for assessing the robustness of community detection and apply it to a world input-output network (WION) to obtain economically plausible results. This method enabled us to rank communities in the WION in terms of their robustness and stability. The algorithmic assignment variability index proposed in this study is shown to have predictive power in terms of forthcoming community rearrangement. We also provide several new approaches for identifying key economic communities. These approaches are based on the application of several centrality measures to a synthetic network in which nodes represent WION communities. Using these methods, we show that in 2000–2014, United States and Japan-centered communities demonstrated decreasing trends, while the importance of the China-centered community predominantly increased. A notable feature of the Germany-centered community rank evolution is that its influence grew only as a result of the inclusion of the Netherlands and Belgium in 2013.

Immigrant Diversity, Institutional Quality, and GVC Position

This paper investigates the effect of immigrant diversity on a country’s position in global value chains (GVCs) and how this effect depends on the institutional quality of destination countries. We investigate this issue using data on 19 manufacturing sectors of 18 OECD countries over the 2000–2014 period. Fixed effects estimation results show that the impact of immigrant diversity on the GVC position is significantly influenced by the institutional quality of destination countries. Specifically, in countries with high (low) institutional quality, immigrant diversity is positively (negatively) associated with the GVC position. Moreover, the interaction effect of immigrant diversity and institutional quality on the GVC position is heterogeneous across immigrant groups and institutional dimensions. This study not only enriches the literature on the relationship between immigrant diversity and GVC position but also discusses new ideas that can promote GVC positions of real economics, which is essential for sustainable economic development.

Intelligent Agents in Co-Evolving Knowledge Networks

We extend the agent-based models for knowledge diffusion in networks, restricted to random mindless interactions and to “frozen” (static) networks, in order to take into account intelligent agents and network co-evolution. Intelligent agents make decisions under bounded rationality. This is the key distinction of intelligent interacting agents compared to mindless colliding molecules, involved in the usual diffusion mechanism resulting from accidental collisions. The co-evolution of link weights and knowledge levels is modeled at the local microscopic level of “agent-to-agent” interaction. Our network co-evolution model is actually a “learning mechanism”, where weight updates depend on the previous values of both weights and knowledge levels. The goal of our work is to explore the impact of (a) the intelligence of the agents, modeled by the selection-decision rule for knowledge acquisition, (b) the innovation rate of the agents, (c) the number of “top innovators” and (d) the network size. We find that rational intelligent agents transform the network into a “centralized world”, reducing the entropy of their selections-decisions for knowledge acquisition. In addition, we find that the average knowledge, as well as the “knowledge inequality”, grow exponentially.