Higher importance shows that global supply is more susceptible to disruptions from the considered country.

...

for

sort by

lowest

Rank

highest

Import

Export

highest

Antibiotics Shortage

Shortages of medications in general and antibiotics were steadily increasing in frequency until the pandemic hit. We perform an in-depth data analysis of the global antibiotic production system and trade network to derive indicators for how vulnerable the antibiotics supply in more than 100 countries is with respect to production disruptions in any of the other countries.

We visualize these trade risk indicators on a map to show the importance of countries in global supply network. It allows the exploration for specific categories of antibiotics and years. We also provide a visual profile for each country to show the dependence ranking, imports and exports.

Data & method

The United Nations Comtrade database provides access to trade data and analytics. It contains detailed import and export statistics for over 200 countries and territories. The database has information on product type, exporter country, importer country, time, trade value, amount, etc.

We retrieved the trading data on a country level from 2010 to 2021 for harmonized codes (HS): 294110, 294120, 294130, 294140, 294190, 300310, 300320, 300410.

HS is a standardized numerical method of classifying traded products, and we use 4 digits(HS-4) and 6 digits(HS-6). HS-6 includes two following digits to further specify categories, but there are a couple of countries do not follow the HS-6 level.

Based on these product codes, we group the data in eight data subsets, one for each HS code, one for all four digits HS codes combined (HS-4 level), and one for all six digits HS codes combined (HS-6 level).

Based on the countries and trade values between two countries in this trading data, we constructed directed trade networks and obtained trade clusters and modularity using the Louvain clustering algorithm on the normalized trade network.

Klimek, P., Dervic, E., Friesenbichler, K. et al. The anatomy of the current antibiotics shortage. ASCII Policy Briefs (2023). https://www.csh.ac.at/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/PB-Antibiotics_Complexity-Science-HubASCII.pdf

Antibiotic Categories

HS Code

Our label

Description

Research

Peter Klimek, Elma Dervic, Klaus Friesenbichler, Markus Gerschberger

Visualization

Liuhuaying Yang