Social Network Analysis of G20 members

What is G20?

G20 or Group of Twenty is a premier committee or league of members for international economic cooperation and decision making. It consists of 19 countries and European Union. 19 countries include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States. G20 was started in 1999 as a meeting of Financial Ministers and Central Bank Governors after the aftermath of Asian financial crisis. First G20 summit was held in 2008 where they played a key role in responding to global financial crisis by taking decisive and directed actions and thus supporting the first stage of economic recovery. G20 leaders meet annually and they met twice in 2008 and 2009 after the global financial crisis. Financial ministers and CB Governors meet regularly during the year to discuss ways to strengthen the global economy, reform international financial institutions, improve financial regulation and implement the key economic reforms that are needed in each member economy.

Success so far..

Toronto summit, June 2008. G20 deficit economies would at least halve fiscal deficits by 2013 and stabilize or reduce sovereign debt ratios by 2016.
Seoul Summit, November 2008. Address large current account imbalances under the Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth, delivered on International Monetary Fund(IMF) quota and governance reforms and made important progress on international financial safety nets.
Cannes Summit, November 2011. Prepared country-specific Cannes Action Project for Growth and Jobs, ensure European Financial Stability Facility, strengthen International Trade Negotiation.
Los Cabos Summit, June 2012. Pledged to increase IMF by $456 billion, Trade facilitation and streamline accession procedure for least developed countries.
St. Petersburg Summit, September 2013. Reforms on achieving strong, sustainable and balanced growth, Accountability Assessment, endorsed OECD-created Action Plan aimed at tax base erosion and profit shifting.
Brisbane Summit, November 2014. Attract private infrastructure investment, reform global financial systems, strengthen tax systems, strengthen energy market resilience, fight corruption.

G20 Turkey Summit, 2015

Inclusiveness which includes both domestic and global dimensions. For this, emphasize on issues related to SMEs, gender equality in employment and address youth unemployment.
Implementation that comprises implementing 1000 commitments that are expected to increase the international GDP by US$ 2 Trillion and create millions of additional jobs by 2018.
Investment to be emphasized as a powerful tool for growth, address investment gaps between member countries by using concrete investment strategies.

How SNA is useful in developing economy

Social networks can influence economic decisions in our everyday life. Same way it can also affect the economy of any country, developed, developing or least developed. Since developing countries need to learn from examples set by developed countries and implement the actions, they must communicate with as many nations and as frequently as possible. Networks undergo rapid changes, with very few remaining the same over a period of time. According to a research, it is easier to study a network in developing nation as compared to developed nation because the former lacks external source of information. In developing countries, economic development is dependent on its social network and vice-versa, it's social network can change according the development it is undergoing. As a matter of fact, word-of-mouth plays a critical role in making networks, i.e. the personal interactions define how and how soon will be develop.For example, your networks can provide you with a job or an opportunity whereas lack of it might prevent you from learnings that can affect economic outcomes.

The idea of SNA and G20 summits

The concept behind G20 summits and Social Network analysis is to check the connection between Financial Ministers and Central Bank Governors of all the member countries and see how frequently do they communicate with each other. The idea is to determine if the meetings between these ministers led to success of the targets of each summit. Since G20 is the premium committee for economic development of the world, all the ministers hold high responsibility in making efforts to reach out to each other and help as much as they can. When it comes to development of world economy, the challenge is to bring out all the member countries together considering their personal conflicts and make them work on the same ground.
It may be common for the Financial Ministers of a country to be country-centered and work towards improving the GDP of their own nation but on the ground of world economy they need to forgo the selfish motives and work towards improving the global economy.

Data Collection and Analysis

For this, we need the communication data of all the Financial Ministers and CB Governors. From there we can link which minister communicated with which other and how frequent was the communication. Communication can include personal visits, talks over telephone or video conference or via electronic mails. Personal visits are easy to know by checking how frequently they visited the other country. Information about other two ways may pose some privacy issues as it may be termed under privacy intrusion. But if the data is being used for analyzing the economic development, it should be the ministers' responsibility to be be open to give the required information. 

Centrality: High centrality of a member would mean more members are approaching him for advice or he is the person being trusted the most with inside information of other nations.

InEigenvector: These members have more members coming in for advice or they are being approached more often than others. They can be assumed as developed nations.

OutEigenvector: These members seek out more for advice from others. They can be assumed as developing or least developed nations.

Cliques: These group of members interact with each other more often as compared to other nations. They can be clubbed together as developed, developing and least developed because they might seek out each other more often because of equal state of development. 

Result of the analysis 

This analysis can be used by officials and presidency of G20 summits to deeper information about its member nations and how often are they interacting apart from the annual or bi-annual meets. This can show that the nations are taking serious and concrete measures in reaching out to each other and helping one an other in the development of global economy. Nation with low out-degree can be spoken to and asked to be more firm in their approach. 

This might not be a full proof plan to know if they are doing their best to help the global economy but it is one the major steps that can be used to G20 presidency if their summits are being taken seriously outside the country and the pledges they take during the summit are being worked on by every member nation.

Helping Hands - SNA to create disaster recovery network

Helping Hands - Disaster Recovery network

Situation:

Natural calamities like floods and heavy rain are frequent in those areas around Yangtze River and this part of southern China is a victim of triggered landslides, heavy rains and flood which led to destruction of many properties claiming people lives. Authorities put in their valiant efforts to save people from this natural destruction aftermath. Our current existing methods though perform their best I feel they are not sufficient. Communications networks will not be functioning efficiently during disaster and it ill is difficult task for the government to reach each and every individual and help them

Some locations in the city can withstand the floods and other forms of destruction but not everyone knows about their whereabouts. My Idea is to identify all these building or locations .Use this information and use SNA to identify the people who are connected well with others and then build a community or tack team, which acts during a natural disaster.

Idea is to make the Disaster people know about their network, safe locations and prepare them for the disaster.

Disaster recovery locations (Safe houses): Locations safe during natural calamities.

Disaster recovery personnel: People who are willing to help during the natural calamity

SNA:

To make this disaster recovery plan,

• 1.    We need to identify disaster recovery personnel
• 2.    We need to know identify their age groups.
• 3     We need to know the Safe houses or Safe locations.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) helps and provides us with effect way of determining people who have strong relations and helps identify their age groups and can help us dichotomize people who don’t show the willingness to participate.

Surveys can be used to gather data and the data can then be organized based on attributes. Surveys can be done online and also can be distributed through voluntary organization and interested parties. The survey will help us get basic contact information and the other main important question set include

All the data we collect will be handled with complete disclosure and only will be used for disaster recovery purposes

• ·      “In case of disaster, would like our disaster recovery to contact you”
• ·      “Basic questions about gender, age group, marital status,job”
• ·      “Do you have been in Military or any other rescue operating organizations”
• ·      “Who are the people you fraternize in your neighborhood”(choose from the list
• ·      “Who are the other people you know in the town“”(choose from the list
• ·      “Are you willing to be a volunteer in case of natural calamity”
• ·      “Which among this disaster recovery locations are near to you”

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With the help of this data we can build a network and group them with attributes. Dichotomize the data to identify the network influencers. The software can help is the influencer based on their connectedness to others. This gives us a simple way to prioritize their potential targets.

After applying centrality measures and the person with high connections (high degree), high out degree can be selected as the influencing personnel.

Special People:

The software allows us to find out the relevant specialists and who have handled this kind of situations and these people can help in training other people on how to handle the disaster recovery.

Bridges:

Software allows us to find the people who seem to form key links between clusters. They should be handled carefully as they are important to hold the network and other people or family members should be encouraged to be looped in to keep the network bridge safe .If we have many people who have form key links among them in their clusters. We should prioritize based on the attributes instead of targeting all of them.

These people will be given training in how to act in disaster and they will be trained to locate the people in their network and inform them with the safe locations and help them

Existing Methods:

There are many voluntary organizations, government set ups to act in the case of disaster and they do extremely good job of taking care of people. But there are still deaths. With the help of SNA we are identify people who talk with each other, know each other and there will be extra sense of motivation for these people to help their own and also at the time of disaster, voice from known friend can be soothing and trusting. So I believe this thing can work and make peoples life better in it’s own way.

Using SNA as a part of a school’s Bullying prevention program

Background

Bullying in schools is a big and seemingly never-ending problem. According to a study mentioned on the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program’s (OBPP) website, 17% of all students reported having been bullied “sometimes or more often” [i]. The situation in Sweden is slightly better, ca 8% of the students answering a survey stated they had been bullied sometimes or more often[ii]. Even if 8% is better than 17%, it’s of course still way too high. Action is desperately needed to decrease that number, if possible to 0%. That however, is no easy feat, mainly because of the fact that most bullying is being done without adults knowing about it, on the way home from school, during recess etc. Since a lot of the bullying these days are done online, it’s even harder than it used to be to get to.

All through my career as an elementary school teacher, I have been a part of my different schools’ bullying prevention teams. We would always follow some sort of program, for example the OBPP. These programs would typically follow certain steps, like:

• Meeting with the victim
• Meeting with the bully
• Meeting with the bully and his/her parents (if the bullying continued)

In addition to these meetings, we would also try to be more preventive. These efforts included being active during recess, speaking with the students in the school yard, but the main thing was a big survey that we conducted among the students twice a year. The survey would include questions like “During the past month, have you been harassed or hit?”, “during the past month, have you seen anyone else being harassed or hit?” and “Is there a specific place where you feel unsafe or afraid? If so, please specify”. Following the survey the bullying prevention team would analyze the questions, to get a picture of the situation at the school. The team would then present its findings to the rest of the faculty. The work surrounding the survey was always time consuming and sometimes we wondered what the use really was of conducting it in the first place, seeing all the potential sources of error. Among them were

• misunderstandings (our students were 6-12 years old, many of them from another country)
• students answering the wrong thing on purpose
• incorrectly formulated questions, asking for the wrong thing

However, now with huge advances in technology and an ever growing number of social media users, there might be new ways to work against bullying:

SNA

There are some different ways that SNA might be helpful in a school’s bullying prevention program. The first thing is teachers and parents being active on Facebook and other similar social media platforms. That way they can get knowledge on how and with whom the children speak. They can also follow discussions, and see if anyone is being treated badly. Of course, this method could end up being more or less useless, because most cyber bullies would probably be smart enough not to write something mean if they knew a parent or teacher was present. They would find other places to bully someone quite fast. But at least they wouldn’t bully anyone until they had found the new place.  

So, is there a way to still be online with the children, to learn about their habits and to find bullies? Maybe... I know of teachers that have created fake identities online, posing as children. They then talked to their students and saw a lot of bad things going on. The moral aspects of this method is something we have to leave up to the individual teacher, I think.

Speaking of more specific SNA tools that we have used in the course, I think some of them can also be used to find bullies and victims. The aforementioned survey, for example, could be analyzed using UCINET and NetDraw. Provided we ask the right questions, we could find out who is the most connected in the students’ networks and also the ones that are the least connected, or even isolates. The isolates would probably be the ones most likely to be victims of bullying. Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee has studied network centrality as a source of power and aggression, which leads to bullying[iii]. Different from common belief, Faris and Felmlee don’t see upbringing or negative personality traits as factors to becoming a bully, instead they say that as a person’s connections increase in number (high betweenness) and with them his/her power, the capacity for aggression also increases. The need to keep the position in the group motivates aggression, according to Faris and Felmlee. This should mean that if we analyze the networks for betweenness, we could find students who are well connected and therefore, following Faris and Felmlee’s research, could be potential bullies. We could also find possible victims, following the same logic.  

Now, I’m of course not saying that all the most connected students are or will be bullies. That is taking it all too far. We need to view the analysis as a strictly preventive measure. It’s valuable to find out who has the potential to become a bully or a victim, because then we as adults can make sure that we keep an extra eye on them. If the common belief is true, that a bully is someone that really feels bad themselves because of bad treatment or bad environment etc, then we might prevent someone from ever becoming a bully, just by talking to them and making sure they feel seen and noticed.

Conclusion

As mentioned, what makes bullying so hard to deal with, is the secretive nature of the activities, not many bullies treat someone bad in the open, they generally hide it very well.

Bullying and how to prevent it, is one of the most difficult things that teachers face. It starts very early, my experience is that at as young as 6 years old, many children face bullying and bad treatment. I’m often amazed at how elaborate the bullying can be. It’s talking behind people’s backs, excluding someone, looks etc. At six years old… No child should be forced to endure that. However, given time and some clever analysis tools, maybe we can at least make life a little better for some children, whether they are bullies or victims.

Sources

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[i]http://www.violencepreventionworks.org/public/index.page

[ii]http://www.forskning.se/nyheterfakta/teman/mobbning/tiofragorochsvar/hurvanligtarmobbning.5.303f5325112d7337692800015850.html

[iii] http://www.asanet.org/images/journals/docs/pdf/Faris_FelmleeASRFeb11.pdf