Published In

Unifying Themes in Complex Systems

Document Type

Pre-Print

Publication Date

2008

Subjects

International trade, International economic relations -- Mathematical models, Globalization, Network topology

Abstract

Long-distance trade has been rapidly increasing in recent years. As traders from around the world exchange goods, they form networks with traders as nodes and transactions as links. We use an agent-based model of a simple artificial economy to examine the emergence of trade networks when the distance between traders matters. Distance can become an issue if fuel for transportation becomes expensive or if greenhouse gas emissions from transportation become a major concern. We model the distance constraint as a transaction cost proportional to the amount of goods traded and the distance that those goods must be transported. We find that the resulting network topology is a good indicator of the stability and resilience of the economic system. The topology is random when there is no distance constraint. As the transaction cost increases, the topology transitions into a stable scale-free structure with some clustering, and a large fraction of trade occurs within local regions around the network hubs. Under these conditions, the final welfare of the traders decreases only modestly and environmental efficiency increases significantly when each region has a diverse combination of tradable goods.

Description

This is the author manuscript of a conference proceeding, subsequently accepted for publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85081-6_50.

DOI

10.1007/978-3-540-85081-6_50

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/27207

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