No Arabic abstract
This paper selects the NARX neural network as the method through literature review, and constructs specific NARX neural networks under application scenarios involving macroeconomic forecasting, national goal setting and global competitiveness assessment. Through case studies on China, US and Eurozone, this study explores how those limited & partial exogenous inputs or abundant & comprehensive exogenous inputs, a small set of most relevant exogenous inputs or a large set of exogenous inputs covering all major aspects of the macro economy, whole area related exogenous inputs or both whole area and subdivision area related exogenous inputs specifically affect the forecasting performance of NARX neural networks for specific macroeconomic indicators or indices. Through the case study on Russia this paper explores how the limited & most relevant exogenous inputs set or the abundant & comprehensive exogenous inputs set specifically influences the prediction performance of those specific NARX neural networks for national goal setting. Finally, comparative studies on the application of NARX neural networks for the forecasts of Global Competitiveness Indices (GCIs) of various economies are conducted, in order to explore whether the specific NARX neural network trained on the basis of the GCI related data of some economies can make sufficiently accurate predictions about GCIs of other economies, and whether the specific NARX neural network trained on the basis of the data of some type of economies can give more accurate predictions about GCIs of the same type of economies than those of different type of economies. Based on all of the above successful application, this paper provides policy recommendations on applying fully trained NARX neural networks that are assessed as qualified to assist or even replace the deductive and inductive abilities of the human brain in a variety of appropriate tasks.
We show how the Shannon entropy function can be used as a basis to set up complexity measures weighting the economic efficiency of countries and the specialization of products beyond bare diversification. This entropy function guarantees the existence of a fixed point which is rapidly reached by an iterative scheme converging to our self-consistent measures. Our approach naturally allows to decompose into inter-sectorial and intra-sectorial contributions the country competitivity measure if products are partitioned into larger categories. Besides outlining the technical features and advantages of the method, we describe a wide range of results arising from the analysis of the obtained rankings and we benchmark these observations against those established with other economical parameters. These comparisons allow to partition countries and products into various main typologies, with well-revealed characterizing features. Our methods have wide applicability to general problems of ranking in bipartite networks.
We study on topological properties of global supply chain network in terms of degree distribution, hierarchical structure, and degree-degree correlation in the global supply chain network. The global supply chain data is constructed by collecting various company data from the web site of Standard & Poors Capital IQ platform in 2018. The in- and out-degree distributions are characterized by a power law with in-degree exponent = 2.42 and out-degree exponent = 2.11. The clustering coefficient decays as power law with an exponent = 0.46. The nodal degree-degree correlation indicates the absence of assortativity. The Bow-tie structure of GWCC reveals that the OUT component is the largest and it consists 41.1% of total firms. The GSCC component comprises 16.4% of total firms. We observe that the firms in the upstream or downstream sides are mostly located a few steps away from the GSCC. Furthermore, we uncover the community structure of the network and characterize them according to their location and industry classification. We observe that the largest community consists of consumer discretionary sector mainly based in the US. These firms belong to the OUT component in the bow-tie structure of the global supply chain network. Finally, we confirm the validity for propositions S1 (short path length), S2 (power-law degree distribution), S3 (high clustering coefficient), S4 (fit-gets-richer growth mechanism), S5 (truncation of power-law degree distribution), and S7 (community structure with overlapping boundaries) in the global supply chain network.
The structure of the International Trade Network (ITN), whose nodes and links represent world countries and their trade relations respectively, affects key economic processes worldwide, including globalization, economic integration, industrial production, and the propagation of shocks and instabilities. Characterizing the ITN via a simple yet accurate model is an open problem. The traditional Gravity Model (GM) successfully reproduces the volume of trade between connected countries, using macroeconomic properties such as GDP, geographic distance, and possibly other factors. However, it predicts a network with complete or homogeneous topology, thus failing to reproduce the highly heterogeneous structure of the ITN. On the other hand, recent maximum-entropy network models successfully reproduce the complex topology of the ITN, but provide no information about trade volumes. Here we integrate these two currently incompatible approaches via the introduction of an Enhanced Gravity Model (EGM) of trade. The EGM is the simplest model combining the GM with the network approach within a maximum-entropy framework. Via a unified and principled mechanism that is transparent enough to be generalized to any economic network, the EGM provides a new econometric framework wherein trade probabilities and trade volumes can be separately controlled by any combination of dyadic and country-specific macroeconomic variables. The model successfully reproduces both the global topology and the local link weights of the ITN, parsimoniously reconciling the conflicting approaches. It also indicates that the probability that any two countries trade a certain volume should follow a geometric or exponential distribution with an additional point mass at zero volume.
This morphological study identifies and measures recent nationwide trends in American street network design. Historically, orthogonal street grids provided the interconnectivity and density that researchers identify as important factors for reducing vehicular travel and emissions and increasing road safety and physical activity. During the 20th century, griddedness declined in planning practice alongside declines in urban form compactness, density, and connectivity as urbanization sprawled around automobile dependence. But less is known about comprehensive empirical trends across US neighborhoods, especially in recent years. This study uses public and open data to examine tract-level street networks across the entire US. It develops theoretical and measurement frameworks for a quality of street networks defined here as griddedness. It measures how griddedness, orientation order, straightness, 4-way intersections, and intersection density declined from 1940 through the 1990s while dead-ends and block lengths increased. However, since 2000, these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. Yet, despite this rebound, when controlling for topography and built environment factors all decades post-1939 are associated with lower griddedness than pre-1940. Higher griddedness is associated with less car ownership - which itself has a well-established relationship with vehicle kilometers traveled and greenhouse gas emissions - while controlling for density, home and household size, income, jobs proximity, street network grain, and local topography. Interconnected grid-like street networks offer practitioners an important tool for curbing car dependence and emissions. Once established, street patterns determine urban spatial structure for centuries, so proactive planning is essential.
The increasing integration of world economies, which organize in complex multilayer networks of interactions, is one of the critical factors for the global propagation of economic crises. We adopt the network science approach to quantify shock propagation on the global trade-investment multiplex network. To this aim, we propose a model that couples a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered epidemic spreading dynamics, describing how economic distress propagates between connected countries, with an internal contagion mechanism, describing the spreading of such economic distress within a given country. At the local level, we find that the interplay between trade and financial interactions influences the vulnerabilities of countries to shocks. At the large scale, we find a simple linear relation between the relative magnitude of a shock in a country and its global impact on the whole economic system, albeit the strength of internal contagion is country-dependent and the intercountry propagation dynamics is non-linear. Interestingly, this systemic impact can be predicted on the basis of intra-layer and inter-layer scale factors that we name network multipliers, that are independent of the magnitude of the initial shock. Our model sets-up a quantitative framework to stress-test the robustness of individual countries and of the world economy to propagating crashes.