The Research Of The Structural Properties And The Motives Of The World Energy Trade Network

As an evitable basis of economic development, the international transaction ofenergy not only stands for the exchange of productive factors, but also an importantway to control the energy sources. Due to its strategic importance, countries activelyinvolved in the world energy trade system through diverse trade strategies, whichresults in a special systematical structure.Based on the bilateral trade data of energy (coal, petroleum, natural gas) in theperiod of2001-2010, we established the international energy trade networks, and thenintroduced the complex network approach to analyze their structural properties. Wefound the sizes of the networks were relatively stable, while the natural gas onescovered most countries. Even they were impacted by the financial crisis, the numberof links and volume were increasing. Second, due to the uneven distribution of naturalresources, the network all featured directionality. Third, the networks wereheterogeneous through the degree distribution curves and the calculations of thestructure entropy, so that the nodes were of various levels of significance. Accordingto the analysis of the node centrality and the core-periphery structure, there existedsome countries possessing the central positions, which controlled most of theresources, and formed a tight core layer through mutually interactions.Besides, we further established a QAP regression through Ucinet, hoping to offerevidence for uncovering transactional motives. The results shown that, the networkswere all influenced by the chosen explainary variables, among which the coal oneswere negatively correlated with the geographic distance, while they positively relatedto the GDP matrix, common language matrix and the contiguity matrix. However,they are all irrelevant in the weighted ones. The results of the petroleum networkswere similar to the unweighted coal ones, but the GDP variable is negative in theunweighted networks and the common language variable is irrelevant. Finally, thegeographic distance variables significantly influenced the formation of the gas tradelinks and volume.In the end, there represents the conclusions of the results, some suggestions forChina’s further development, and a future perspective.