Fragmentation of production: New challenges for big data–a complex network approach

Globalization is one of the most relevant economic phenomena of the last decades. Due to this reason, the economies of different countries are strongly interconnected. This may lead to higher robustness or higher vulnerability of the whole economic system, depending on the economic scenario. Traditional models are unable to represent the complex relationship among firms. This may lead to a misunderstanding of the complex interconnections between countries, underestimating vulnerability of the world economic system. In this framework, a complex network approach, based on graph theory, is a valuable tool to outline the interdependencies of different countries and their impact on the stability of the whole economic system. Nowadays economic Big Data are available on globalization, helping to have a rigorous approach when shading light on these interdependencies. In this paper, the complex network analysis is applied on a particular shade of globalization, namely fragmentation of production.