The rise and fall of countries on world trade web: A network perspective

World Trade Web is the backbone of the global economy system. Identifying influential countries and regions in such a network and revealing their importance evolution over time are helpful for understanding global economic development. Here, we collect the worldwide trade data in commodities of 232 countries and regions from 1996 to 2015 from the UN Comtrade Database, based on which a series of weighted world trade networks are constructed. Since the networks are almost fully connected, most of the existing methods may fail in identifying the important nodes. To tackle this issue, we apply the generalized Degree, H-index and Coreness (DHC) theorem to the constructed networks and use weighted degree and coreness to quantify nodes’ importance, since they can make full use of the weight information to accurately evaluate nodes’ significance. Then, we analyze the rankings of countries and regions measured by various indicators, whose differences and advantages are also compared. We further present the evolution of countries’ significance over time, two typical groups of countries. The results show that the influence of a country or region has a strong correlation with its economic scale, but a relatively weak correlation with the diversity of its trade structure. Finally, based on the findings, we put forward corresponding strategies to enhance the trade influence for different types of countries.