La competitività del settore dell’olio di oliva attraverso l’analisi del network degli scambi commerciali internazionali

This paper aims at showing the explanatory potential of network methods applied to the analysis of Country level competitiveness within specific productive sectors. More specifically, we focused on each Country’s position within the network of international commodity trade relationships, assuming that this influences its Country level competitive advantage. We based this statement on Ronald Burt’s theory of "structural holes" which, if existent within a network, grant to those agents occupying the holes the chance to manage a strategic resource which becomes a competitive advantage. In order to test this hypothesis we applied network analysis to the international virgin olive oil trade network, represented as a weighted, directed network (wdn).