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Free Trade Agreement networks

Every UN member state, every regional trade agreement, one network: 193 countries and 4,268 co-membership ties from 340 RTAs. The simulation below is the actual dataset: drag countries around, hover for their treaty partners.

The network

Nodes are states; an edge means two countries share membership of at least one regional trade agreement. The big structures jump straight out of the Louvain partition: a 77-strong European cluster, the African bloc built around AfCFTA, and the Asia–Pacific web that RCEP and CPTPP stitched together. The margins are where it gets fun: 13 countries have no FTA ties at all. North Korea, Cuba, Somalia and Eritrea drift at the rim of the simulation.

Methods

The analysis ran in R: centrality measures, community detection with both Louvain and walktrap, and ERGM models with legal-origin and log-GDP covariates. The ERGMs test whether countries with similar legal systems and similar-sized economies are more likely to end up in agreements together, beyond what density and degree alone explain.

About the demo

The force simulation is hand-rolled vanilla canvas, written without libraries: repulsion, springs and gravity with a cooling schedule. The Louvain communities and degrees were computed in Python (seed 42) from the same spreadsheet the R analysis used, and shipped to the page as a 41KB data file. request the full report →