Narrow Results

ICIO data have proven itself to be a reliable source for the analysis of economic globalization, with which sectors all over the world could be constructed into a sophisticated GVC, bringing the advantages of simultaneous study on international and domestic economies in detail as a holistic network. This paper uses OECD–WTO TiVA data to set up GIVCN-TiVA networks as the general analytical framework, depicting the transferring process of intermediate goods among sectors of various countries/regions. Secondly, the conception of brokerage roles in SNA has been adopted to redefine sector’s function while linkage exists between its upstream providers and downstream consumers, referred to as “Trade Brokerage Property”, as well as to quantify the ratio of each types of the roles. Thirdly, a set of simulations have been defined to testify the contribution that different TBPs incur to the robustness of global economic system. Finally, analyses on TBPs and NTBPs have been carried out in the levels of industry and country/region, respectively.

Based on the specific characteristics and requirements for an adequate electronic commerce system support, this article gives an overview of the respective distributed systems technologies which are available for open and heterogeneous electronic commerce applications. Abstracting from basic communication mechanisms such as (transactionally secure) remote procedure calls and remote database access mechanisms, this includes service trading and brokerage functions as well as security aspects including such as notary and non-repudiation functions. Further important elements of a system infrastructure for electronic commerce applications are: Common middleware infrastructures, componentware techniques, distributed and mobile agent technologies etc. As electronic transactions enter the phase of performance, increasingly new and important functions are required. Among these are: Negotiation protocols to support both the settlement and fulfillment of electronic contracts as well as ad-hoc workflow management support for compound and distributed services in electronic commerce applications. In addition to an overview of the state of the art of the respective technology, the article briefly presents some related projects conducted by the authors jointly with international partners in order to realize some of the important new functions of a system infrastructure for open distributed electronic commerce applications.