Structure of trade flow networks for world commodities

Abstract We analyze the structural change of the trade flow network for different commodities from 1995 to 2013. We investigate the hierarchical organization of Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) using the hierarchical path. The hierarchy for all products has been increased significantly with the evolution of time in last decade except the period of financial crises. We observe the remarkable increase of the hierarchy for the products of manufactured goods classified by materials, machinery and transport equipment, and crude oil from different periods. The man-made products such as machinery and transport equipment and manufactured goods are more hierarchical than the natural products such as mineral fuels. We observe that the role of China on some commodities in world trade is growing and predicts that China will be next giant hub on world trade network.