Measuring Economic Globalization: Exploring methods to map the changing structure of world trade

This paper is the first in a series of papers centered on an empirical exploration of globalization processes. We seek to understand globalization processes through a structural exploration of changing global transactions of multiple types, beginning with international trade. We believe exploring the structure of multiple transactions over time can provide us with insights into the role and position of multiple entities (states and nonstate actors), how these are impacted by globalization processes, and what mechanisms are involved in large scale structural changes. The current study compares three different methodological approaches to world trade analysis— a network based data mining program, social network analysis, and a model we describe as a geometric representation, combining aspects of log-linear analysis with multidimensional scaling and correspondence analysis. We examine and compare changes in the structure of world trade at three time points: 1980, 1990, and 2001. We focus on evaluating methodological approaches that can be used to explore the structure of global trade. In future papers, we will be testing hypotheses derived from world systems theory and competing theories of economic globalization. The study addresses three key questions: 1) What methods can we use to assess the impact of changes associated with economic globalization processes? 2) Do patterns of international trade conform to a core / periphery structure through time? and 3) What other (non-economic) factors impact the structure of world trade? The findings yield some important generalizations. First, the results from three different approaches produced the same general structure. We found that the hierarchical nature of the world-system has been remarkably persistent over time in terms of world system zones but that there are important modifications. The presence of Western countries including the US, Canada and many Western European states in the core has been remarkably consistent. What has changed is the number of Asian countries—including China and the four Asian tigers—that trade at high levels with core members. The pattern suggests a strong triad composed of North America, Europe and Asia form the core. Regional trade agreements of the core members appear to have had a positive impact on the trade growth of member countries individually and relative to overall trade. Finally, several Latin American countries have experienced upward mobility but there has been an increasing peripheralization of African countries.