YIN Xiaoxiao, TAO Yewei, ZHAO Xiaoqian, SHI Lei
At present, the world is facing a complex and volatile semiconductor trade environment. To identify the impact of the economic crisis on international trade networks, this paper chooses semiconductors, the foundation of the digital economy, as the research object, and uses the semiconductor trade data of 2019 in the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics database to build a directed weighted semiconductor international network based on complex network theory. Its topological structure characteristics are analyzed. On this basis, the cascade failure model is used to explore the propagation process of the semiconductor supply crisis in the international trade network. The results show that the semiconductor international trade network presents the characteristics of a small world. The middle and high-income economies such as China and the United States are at the center of the network, and they are very active and have an important influence in the semiconductor trade market. Once the risk of semiconductor supply shortages arose in the United States, Italy, South Korea, the Netherlands, France, and Japan, the size of the avalanche of economies triggered through China is extremely large, revealing that China played a crucial intermediary role in the crisis transmission process. When China is the source of the semiconductor crisis propagation, the number of economies directly infected by China after one iteration is ranked first, emphasizing China's important position in the global semiconductor trade. The findings of the paper not only contribute to the in-depth understanding of the global international trade pattern of semiconductors, expanding the related research in the field of semiconductors, but also provide useful policy suggestions for the development of China's high-tech industries such as semiconductors, the formulation of international trade policies and effective response to the risks of the global semiconductor supply chain.