ABSTRACT: The comparative advantage among countries determines their trade relations pattern and even regional governance mode, which has profound significance for understanding the Belt and Road (B&R) initiative. B&R has been gaining attention internationally since its proposal. This paper aims to investigate the structure and influence factors of trade competitive advantage networks of the countries along the B&R (BR-TCANs). Different from the existing literature, this paper constructs the directed trade comparative advantage index (DTCA), and establishes BR-TCANs by using the bilateral trade data in 1993–2018 collected from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UNCOMTRADE). Subsequently, based on complex network approach, we analyze the structure and its evolution characteristics of BR-TCANs, and then discuss the factors that influence the formation of BR-TCANs' structure by using exponential random graph models (ERGMs). The results show that there are obvious small-world and reciprocity characteristics on BR-TCANs. Both Turkey and Russia have the largest scope of trade competitive advantages, and China has the strongest intermediation ability in BR-TCANs. BR-TCANs form three communities, including the West, the North and the South. The formation of BR-TCANs is greatly influenced by popularity, clustering, reciprocity and self-reinforcing mechanism, and is manifested in the heterogeneity of GDP and FDI and in the homogeneity of population and trade openness. Countries with higher GDP, spoken language and currency advantages are more likely to establish trade competitive advantages with others. Accordingly, the BR-TCANs are embedded in the networks of common language, currency, geographic boundary and free trade agreements.

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