DHL Global Connectedness Index 2014

DHL Global Connectedness Index 2014
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Figure 2.8
Regional Average Depth Scores by Pillar
Overall
Trade
Pillars
Capital
Information
People
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
Europe North America East Asia & Pacific Middle East & North Africa
South & Central America, Caribbean South & Central Asia Sub-Saharan Africa
Europe leads by a wide margin on overall global connectedness depth, followed by East Asia & Pacific. Europe also ranks first on depth across all of the
pillars of the index.
the largest part—of international interactions. This pattern
suggests that countries’ levels of global connectedness
should be assessed not only on a global basis but also in
relation to the integration of their own regions.
This section begins by introducing a set of comparisons
among regions, and then delves into discussion of connectedness
patterns in each of the world’s regions. Note
that the regional analysis of global connectedness, depth,
and breadth scores that follows is based on simple averages
of scores across the countries in each of the regions, so
what are described for compactness as comparisons among
regions reflect, more precisely, comparisons among average
countries within the regions. For a list of how countries
were classified into regions for this analysis, please refer to
Table B.5 in Appendix B.
Figure 2.6 displays average global connectedness, depth,
breadth, and pillar scores for countries in each region. In
terms of overall global connectedness, it reveals two sets
of regions: one with relatively higher levels of connectedness—Europe,
North America, East Asia & Pacific, and
Middle East & North Africa—and one with notably lower
overall connectedness—South & Central America & Caribbean,
South and Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Consistent with the pattern described above, countries in
the former (more connected) regions average 5 times the
GDP per capita of countries in the latter (less connected)
regions.
Figure 2.7 shows the average changes in scores from 2011
to 2013 for each of the regions. It shows that South &
Central America & the Caribbean had the largest gain in
overall global connectedness during the past two years, followed
closely by North America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
It also reveals that the Middle East & North Africa was the
only region to suffer a large drop in its global connectedness.
To understand more clearly what global connectedness
means to different regions, it is useful to compare regions’
average depth scores and the intra-regional proportion of
their international flows, as shown in Figures 2.8 and 2.9.
This juxtaposition suggests, first of all, that while depth
and breadth at the country level are only weakly correlated
(the correlation coefficient between countries’ depth and
breadth scores in 2013 was only 0.17), there seems to be a
strong association between regions’ average depth scores
and the intra-regional share of their international flows.
The regions generally follow the same rank order on both
metrics. Regional integration has been an essential part of
rather than an alternative to global integration.
One exception to the pattern described in the previous
paragraph is Middle East & North Africa, which ranks
third on depth but fifth on intra-regional integration. Presumably,
this reflects in part the importance of oil exports
to this region, which are traded in large volumes over
long distances, and contribute to other flows, such as this
region’s employment of large numbers of migrant workers