Features and evolution of international crude oil trade relationships: A trading-based network analysis

• Countries tend to establish stable trade relationships.
• International crude oil trade system is evolving into an ordered hierarchy structure.
• Countries become more integrated as borders of trade communities are becoming vaguer.
• Different types of events show different impacts on the networks.

Traditional international trade theories have some limits in analyzing international crude oil trade as a system with numerous countries and complicated relationships. Complex network theory provides a method to analyze the world-wide trade system entirely and partly. Complex network models on direct relationships are fundamental analysis; we went further and established a new model based on indirect relationships.This paper established a trading-based network model of international crude oil to study the relationship between countries with common trade partners. There are two types of networks in our model: importing-based network and exporting-based network. We studied their evolution of scales, stability, hierarchy structure and partition over time.We found that the international crude oil trade is evolving into a stable, ordered and integrated system, and different types of events show different impacts on the importing and exporting countries, thus we provided different policy implications.