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, 5 Anglo-Saxon countries which prefer to trade in US dollar and the 11 BRICS+ which 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 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 3 distinct groups: two groups of countries preferring, whatever is the initial distribution of the trade currency preferences, to trade, 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 USD, EUR and BRI, and present the reduced Google matrix description of the trade relations between the Anglo-Saxon countries and the BRICS+.