Data 

International Monterrey Fund (IMF) Direction of trade (DOTs) data used for this study this study. This paper analyzes DOTs data for the period 1990 to 2016. All available data and countries are used except, countries which don’t have any bilateral export or data has not reported due to any reasons by the IMF. Programming language Python and package Networkx\cite{Hagberg2014} used to analyze the data.
 

Discussion

This paper examines all non-trivial bilateral trade relationship except a few exceptions. Countries having an only export relationship or only import relationship are excluded from the analysis. In network science terminology, countries with either 0 in-degree or 0 out-degree are removed from the network. The decision of removing such nodes will help to eliminate the problems of dangling nodes and dangling links \cite{Chakraborty,Page1998,Ermann2015,Ermann2011}. Dangling nodes have zero out links and dangling links are links which point to some node or country that have zero out-link\cite{Langville2005,Page1998}. The following section discusses the result of the application of link analysis algorithms to the WTN.

PageRank

According to PageRank algorithms, each country can be given a PageRank score, which shows the country significance in the WTN (Langville & Meyer, 2005). PageRank score of all countries sums up to 1 and this score lies between 0 and 1, 0 being lest influential. Figure \ref{832894} shows the PageRank score of 10 countries, which have the highest PageRank score in the year 2016, for the years 1990 to 2016. In the context of trade network, PageRank score measures the importance of a country in terms of the value of export it receives. The figure shows the USA has the highest PageRank score throughout the study period, with major ups and downs. Germany PageRank has a decreasing trend, with the sign of an upward trend from 2013. PageRank score of China shows higher variability among all. China had lowest PageRank importance during the beginning of the study period (1990) and second highest PageRank during the end of the study period (2016). A sharp increase in PageRank importance of China started from 2000 and continue for the rest of the decade. China became a member of World Trade Organization (WTO) at 2001, making its domestic market open to international Trade. Whereas, PageRank scores of the other 7 countries shows decreasing trend. Notably, PageRank score of these seven countries started conversing towards one point from the beginning of this decade. As the sum of page rank score of all nodes in the network or graph is one, increase in score of one country will affect the scores of other countries.