Beyond Methodological Nationalism : Modelling Cross-National Health Spending through Graph-Theoretic and Relational Indicators of International Trade Networks: A quantitative analysis based on UN Comtrade and World Bank WDI data (2000–2019)
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- Much of the comparative research in the social sciences has been shaped by methodological nationalism, treating countries as self-contained units defined solely by their internal characteristics. In the field of international trade, this perspective is reinforced by the widespread use of gravity models, which reduce global exchanges to dyadic interactions and neglect the structural interdependencies between states. Building on recent critiques, this thesis adopts a relational approach to examine whether countries’ positions in the world trade network help explain cross-national disparities in health expenditure. To address this question, the study develops a set of structural indicators adapted from demography (Courgeau, 1988) and applies them to bilateral import trade flows between 103 countries from 2000 to 2019, using UN Comtrade and World Bank data. These indicators capture the intensity and asymmetry of trade relations and are complemented by conventional network centrality measures. The quantitative analysis combines these indicators with multivariate methods and panel regressions to assess their explanatory power for cross-national health spending. Overall, the findings suggest that structural positions in the trade network contribute, to some extent, to explaining disparities in health expenditure, even after accounting for geopolitical factors. By adapting demographic indicators to international trade flows, this study illustrates their potential for capturing structural asymmetries and opens promising avenues for future investigations into the relational dynamics of international trade.