H13G-1620
Scaling Effect In Trade Network
Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Xiaowen Lin, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States, Megan Konar, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Urbana, IL, United States, Richard Rushforth, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, United States, Benjamin L Ruddell, Arizona State University, Fulton Schools of Engineering, Tempe, AZ, United States and Jeff Reimer, Oregon State University, Applied Economics, Corvallis, OR, United States
Abstract:
Scaling is an important issue in the physical sciences. Economic trade is increasingly of interest to the scientific community due to the natural resources (e.g. water, carbon, nutrients, etc.) embodied in traded commodities. Trade refers to the spatial and temporal redistribution of commodities, and is typically measured annually between countries. However, commodity exchange networks occur at many different scales, though data availability at finer temporal and spatial resolution is rare. Exchange networks may prove an important adaptation measure to cope with future climate and economic shocks. As such, it is essential to understand how commodity exchange networks scale, so that we can understand opportunities and roadblocks to the spatial and temporal redistribution of goods and services. To this end, we present an empirical analysis of trade systems across three spatial scales: global, sub-national in the United States, and county-scale in the United States. We compare and contrast the network properties, the self-sufficiency ratio, and performance of the gravity model of trade for these three exchange systems.
