The International Olive Oil Trade A network analysis

Aim of this paper is to test weather or not the Network Analysis (NA) could possibly help to grasp Country level competitiveness in the International Trade Network (ITN) of a specific commodity. We focus over the positions that each Country occupies within the net of international trade exchanges assuming this could lead to competitive advantage. Starting from Ronald Burt's structural holes theory, we move forward analyzing the whole network evolution in the last years. We apply NA to the world network of valued exchange relationships of virgin olive oils building a 12 years time series of weighted directed networks (WDN).