Opinion Formation in the World Trade Network

Abstract

We extend the opinion formation approach to probe the world influence of economical organizations. Our opinion formation model mimics a battle between currencies within the international trade network. Based on the United Nations Comtrade database, we construct the world trade network for the years of the last decade from 2010 to 2020. We consider different core groups constituted by countries preferring to trade in a specific currency. We will consider principally two core groups, namely, five Anglo-Saxon countries that prefer to trade in US dollar and the 11 BRICS+ that prefer to trade in a hypothetical currency, hereafter called BRI, pegged to their economies. We determine the trade currency preference of the other countries via a Monte Carlo process depending on the direct transactions between the countries. The results obtained in the frame of this mathematical model show that starting from the year 2014, the majority of the world countries would have preferred to trade in BRI than USD. The Monte Carlo process reaches a steady state with three distinct groups: two groups of countries preferring to trade in whatever is the initial distribution of the trade currency preferences, one in BRI and the other in USD, and a third group of countries swinging as a whole between USD and BRI depending on the initial distribution of the trade currency preferences. We also analyze the battle between three currencies: on one hand, we consider USD, BRI and EUR, the latter currency being pegged by the core group of nine EU countries. We show that the countries preferring EUR are mainly the swing countries obtained in the frame of the two currencies model. On the other hand, we consider USD, CNY (Chinese yuan), OPE, the latter currency being pegged to the major OPEC+ economies for which we try to probe the effective economical influence within international trade. Finally, we present the reduced Google matrix description of the trade relations between the Anglo-Saxon countries and the BRICS+.

Keywords

• international trade
• complex networks
• opinion formation model