Quantifying the Robustness of Countries’ Competitiveness by Network-Based Methods

Figure 7

(Color online) Fluctuation of the fitness scores of USA and China. (a) The decrease of the fitness of USA and China by reducing 5% of the American soya beans and of the Chinese Iron steels. (b) The increase of the fitness by increasing 5% of the export of Chinese aircraft. Note that we do not simulate the performance before the year 1975, because that USA and China established diplomatic relations in the year 1972. After 1972, China built diplomatic relations with many western countries and started to integrate into the global economics. Thus, we start the experiments from 1975 to avoid noisy fluctuations.

(a)

(b)