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Hubs and Authorities in World Trade Networks

article link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106762/

When connecting to INFO 2040 class context, we want to know how authority and hub values are well applied into the real world. To begin with, we want to first define what authority and hub based on the class because it’s important to understand their meanings before applying them to the real-life situations. We define the Authority as the pages we originally sought for, the prominent and highly endorsed answers to the queries. We also define the Hubs as the high-value lists for the query. In general, people will apply the two concepts into analyzing the worldwide networks, such as economic globalization, medical care. The article I’m looking into day is about an application of them into the world trade from 1992 to 2002.

This article investigates the economic hubs and authorities of the world trade network (WTN) from 1992 to 2012. This is a period of economic globalization. Scientists determine the values of weighted HITS hub and authority for every country in the world by adopting a weighted hyperlink-induced topic search (HITS) algorithm. Within the understanding of WTN, the article determined that “authority values are large for countries with significant imports from large hub countries, and hub values are large for countries with significant exports to high-authority countries”. The article has given multiple examples to describe the two concepts. For example, the United States was the largest economic authority within WTN, but its authority value started to decline at the beginning of the 21st century. Besides, China instead now has the largest hub within WTN and in the meantime, its authority value has grown significantly when as transforming into the “market of the world”. Also, the article notes that European countries display a tendency to trade mostly within the countries in the European Union, thus reducing Europe’s hub and authority values overall. Another example the article has elaborated is the slow increase in Japan’s authority value and the decrease in hub value.

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