Telecommunication, Transportation, and Trade in the Pacific Basin Community

Abstract

This paper examines the telecommunication, transportation, and trade networks and tests structural relationships among the countries in the Pacific basin community. An attempt is made to show that the relations or locations of nations in the Pacific Rim could be meaningfully conceptualized as flows of transactions between countries and subjected to systematic empirical analysis. In sum, the various indicators, such as system density, connectedness, number of links, integrativeness, from NEGOPY network analysis reveal a similar structure for the telecommunication, the transportation, and the trade networks. There is one group with some of the advanced industrialized countries such as Japan and the United States at the center for all three networks, confirming the replication of inequalities in political and economic area. The telephone is one of the “space-adjusting” technologies that change the distance among countries and allows for higher degrees of accessibility to remote locations. No nation is identified as an isolate in the telecommunication network, whereas four nations are identified as isolates in the transportation network. Geographical distance may affect the transportation network. The results of correspondence analysis reveal that the transportation and the trade network show a similar pattern of radial structure, although the radial structure of the trade network is weaker than that of the transportation network. Each arm in the both networks is composed of regional neighbor nations. This suggests that both networks in the Pacific basin community are, in part, organized by physical location. This is also shown in the telecommunication network.

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