World Trade Web is the backbone of the global economy system. Identifying influential countries and regions in such a network and revealing their importance evolution over time are helpful for understanding global economic development. Here, we collect the worldwide trade data in commodities of 232 countries and regions from 1996 to 2015 from the UN Comtrade Database, based on which a series of weighted world trade networks are constructed. Since the networks are almost fully connected, most of the existing methods may fail in identifying the important nodes. To tackle this issue, we apply the generalized Degree, H-index and Coreness (DHC) theorem to the constructed networks and use weighted degree and coreness to quantify nodes’ importance, since they can make full use of the weight information to accurately evaluate nodes’ significance. Then, we analyze the rankings of countries and regions measured by various indicators, whose differences and advantages are also compared. We further present the evolution of countries’ significance over time, two typical groups of countries. The results show that the influence of a country or region has a strong correlation with its economic scale, but a relatively weak correlation with the diversity of its trade structure. Finally, based on the findings, we put forward corresponding strategies to enhance the trade influence for different types of countries.

中文翻译：

---

世界贸易网络上国家的兴衰：网络视角

世界贸易网是全球经济体系的支柱。在这样一个网络中识别有影响力的国家和地区，并揭示其重要性随时间的演变，有助于理解全球经济发展。在这里，我们从联合国 Comtrade 数据库中收集了 1996 年至 2015 年全球 232 个国家和地区的商品贸易数据，并在此基础上构建了一系列加权的世界贸易网络。由于网络几乎完全连接，大多数现有方法可能无法识别重要节点。为了解决这个问题，我们应用广义度数，H-index and Coreness (DHC) theorem to构建的网络，并使用加权度和核心度来量化节点的重要性，因为它们可以充分利用权重信息来准确评估节点的重要性。然后，我们分析了各种指标衡量的国家和地区的排名，并比较了它们的差异和优势。我们进一步展示了国家重要性随时间的演变，这两个典型的国家组。结果表明，一个国家或地区的影响力与其经济规模有很强的相关性，但与其贸易结构的多样性相关性相对较弱。最后，基于研究结果，我们提出了相应的策略来提升不同类型国家的贸易影响力。