Tracking the evolution of cooperative relationship networks among countries located along the Belt and Road: an application of massive cooperation events data

ABSTRACT

Inter-country related events which have been reported by news media have become important data for the study of international and regional cooperation relations. Cooperation event data from 1980 to 2015 were used to judge the positions and roles of countries located along the Belt and Road. This study’s results indicate that the regional cooperation of the countries along the Belt and Road formed a bidirectional hub network structure with China and Russia as the core. The unbalanced pattern revealed showed that East Asia and South Asia were located at the core and periphery respectively; Central and Eastern Europe, along with Western Asia and the Middle East regions, were closely connected; and Central Asia was weakly connected. The level of differences, openness degree differences, and economic scale differences of the countries along the aforementioned line were found to have important influences on the strengths of the cooperative relationships. A single-center radiation structure and a multi-center tight structure were found to be the significant regional characteristics of the spatial organization pattern of the cooperation relationship network. The study provides a new perspective for identifying the structural characteristics and regional patterns of international regional cooperation relationship networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Cooperative relationships
• complex networks
• structural characteristics
• evolutionary model
• the Belt and Road

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Serial number: 41501122, 41671122, 41871137 & 41430635).

Disclosure statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. On the global trade network, see Pan, Lai, and Ge (2015); Zou and Liu (2016). On the knowledge cooperation network, see Liu, Gui, Duan, and Yin (2017); Wang, Wang, Zeng, Zhao, and Zhao (2017). On the world transnational investment network, see Yang, Du, You, Shi, and Yan (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [41501122, 41671122, 41871137 & 4143063].