Entropy of international trades.

Abstract

The organization of international trades is highly complex under the collective efforts towards economic profits of participating countries given inhomogeneous resources for production. Considering the trade flux as the probability of exporting a product from a country to another, we evaluate the entropy of the world trades in the period 1950-2000. The trade entropy has increased with time, and we show that it is mainly due to the extension of trade partnership. For a given number of trade partners, the mean trade entropy is about 60% of the maximum possible entropy, independent of time, which can be regarded as a characteristic of the trade fluxes' heterogeneity and is shown to be derived from the scaling and functional behaviors of the universal trade-flux distribution. The correlation and time evolution of the individual countries' gross-domestic products and the number of trade partners show that most countries achieved their economic growth partly by extending their trade relationship.