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Evolution of the rare earth trade network: from the perspective of dependency and competition

Yes / As a global strategic reserve resource, rare earth has been widely used in important industries, such as military equipment and biomedicine. However, through existing analyses based on the total volume of rare earth trade, the competition and dependency behind the trade cannot be revealed. In this paper, based on the principle of trade preference and import similarity, we construct dependency and competition networks and use complex network analysis to study the evolution of the global rare earth trade network from 2002 to 2018. The main conclusions are as follows: the global rare earth trade follows the Pareto principle, and the trade network shows a scale-free distribution. China has become the largest country in both import and export of rare earth trade in the world since 2017. In the dependency network, China has become the most dependent country since 2006. The result of community division shows that China has separated from the American community and formed new communities with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. The United States of America has formed a super-strong community with European and Asian countries. In the competition network, the distribution of competition intensity follows a scale-free distribution. Most countries are faced with low-intensity competition, but competing countries are relatively numerous. The competition related to China has increased significantly. The competition source of the United States of America has shifted from Mexico to China. China, the USA, and Japan have been the cores of the competition network. / This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Foundation (Grant No. 22YJC910014), the Social Sciences Planning Youth Project of Anhui Province (Grant No. AHSKQ2022D138), and the Innovation Development Research Project of Anhui Province (Grant No. 2021CX053).

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19507
Date22 June 2023
CreatorsXu, J., Li, J., Vincent, Charles, Zhao, X.
PublisherElsevier
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Published version
Rights© 2023 China University of Geosciences (Beijing) and Peking University. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of China University of Geosciences (Beijing). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)., CC-BY-NC-ND

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