Exploring the True Relationship Among Countries from Flow Data of International Trade and Migration

Abstract

The relationship among various entities in the socio-economic systems is an important part of complexity research. Here we combine the general gravity model and minimum reverse flows idea to propose a general framework to reveal comprehensive relationship among entities with intimacy and hierarchy based on flow data among entities. Besides, we apply this method to comprehensively analyze international trade network and population migration network. Based on the empirical flow data, we calculate the effective distance among countries and rank or grade of countries, which could reveal the true relationship among them. The countries in global trade are clustered but not hierarchical, while the relationship among countries in international migration is just the opposite. They are hierarchical and not clustered.