Regional trade flows

• Bilateral trade is a complex phenomenon (Serrano and Boguñá 2003)
• Its complexity increases when it is approached from a spatially disaggregated perspective
• Regions are more specialised and open than countries
• Regions are more open to trade with other regions in comparison to national economies
• Important external trade dependencies
• Regions vary a lot in terms of their specialisation patterns, trade relationships and openness

Regional trade flows

• Knowing and predicting regional trade helps to understand:
  • regional economic performance
  • exposure to external shocks
  • place-based development
• Employment vulnerability and transmission of internal and external shocks is different for different regions.

Regional trade flow: hardly any data

• Big caveat: interregional trade data
• Europe: spatially disaggregated IO for NUTS2 regions (Thissen, Diodato, and Van Oort 2013b, 2013a)
• Costly, difficult exercise

Our contribution

• Utilise the digital traces that interregional trade leaves behind
• Model and predict trade flows for the UK NUTS2 regions
• Scrape open web data
• Hyperlinks between commercial websites
• ML techniques for predictions of unseen interregional trade flows
• Spatially disaggregated trade data
• Hypothesis: such hyperlinks reflect business and trade relations

Spatial studies using hyperlinks

• Hyperlinks tend to follow national borders and gravitate towards the US (Halavais 2000)
• Keßler (2017) used the hyperlinks between German Wikipedia webpages to represent the hierarchy of urban centres in Germany
• Salvini and Fabrikant (2016) used a the English Wikipedia to build a graph of world cities
• Hyperlinks between and to administrative websites to study spatial relationships and structure (Holmberg and Thelwall 2009; Holmberg 2010; Janc 2015)

Spatial studies using hyperlinks

• Lin, Halavais, and Zhang (2007) used webblog hyperlinks to analyse the spatial reflections of the blogsphere
• Jones, Spigel, and Malecki (2010) focused on the New York City theater scene to investigate the existence and role of a ‘virtual buzz’

Web data and business studies

• Businesses may not expose all of their strategies on their websites, but neither do they do during surveys (Arora et al. 2013)
• Business websites:
  • spreading information
  • establishing a public image
  • supporting online transactions
  • sharing opinions

Business studies using hyperlinks

• Hyperlinks to business websites reflect business motivations and contain useful business information (Vaughan, Gao, and Kipp 2006)
• Significant correlations between the number of incoming links and business performance (Vaughan 2004; Vaughan and Wu 2004)
• Krüger et al. (2020) used hyperlinks between business websites in Germany to test the role of different proximity frameworks
• Innovative businesses share more hyperlinks with other business, which also tend to be innovative

Web data: The Internet Archive

• The largest archive of webpages in the world
• 273 billion webpages from over 361 million websites, 15 petabytes of storage (1996 -)
• A web crawler starts with a list of URLs (a seed list) to crawl and downloads a copy of their content
• Using the hyperlinks included in the crawled URLs, new URLs are identified and crawled (snowball sampling)
• Time-stamp

Web data: The Internet Archive