[3O2-OS-1b] [Organized Session] OS-1

[3O2-OS-1b-05] Conflict mineral regulations based on network structure of global supply chain

〇Takayuki Mizuno¹, Takaaki Ohnishi², Tsutomu Watanabe² (1. NII, 2. Univ. of Tokyo)

Keywords:Computational Social Science, Complex networks, Conflict mineral

We investigate the network structure of global supply chain using a dataset that contains information on business partners for about 500,000 firms worldwide. First, we show that this network has scale-free topology and that the shortest path length is around six. Second, we show through community structure analysis that the firms comprise a community with those firms that belong to the same industry but different home countries, indicating the globalization of firms’ production activities. Finally, we discuss what such production globalization implies for the proliferation of conflict minerals (i.e., minerals extracted from conflict zones and sold to firms in other countries to perpetuate fighting) through global supply chain. We show that several bridge firms between some specific industries and countries play an important role in the global proliferation of conflict minerals.