Throughout the period, LAC accounts for between 52% and 66% of global weighted out-degree, confirming its persistent role as the primary supplier region in the copper concentrate market. However, structural indicators suggest that volumetric dominance does not automatically translate into regional cohesion. While maximum and average betweenness centrality values show that individual LAC countries occasionally assume brokerage roles, average clustering coefficients remain low, indicating limited intra-regional trade density. To complement these results, Figures 1A and 1B visualize the global trade network in 2010 and 2024. In both figures, edge thickness and color intensity represent weighted out-degree, with darker and thicker arrows indicating stronger export flows. Node size reflects betweenness centrality, while the circular outline around nodes highlights countries with relatively high brokerage relevance within the network. In 2010 (Figure 1), LAC exporters—particularly Chile and Peru—are embedded in a relatively multipolar global structure, where export flows are distributed across several major demand hubs. By 2024 (Figure 2), the network becomes more centralized. Export flows from Chile and Peru increasingly converge toward a dominant extra-regional hub, and the visual concentration of thicker and darker edges reflects this structural consolidation. From a LAC perspective, this transformation suggests convergence toward shared global demand centers rather than the emergence of a self-contained regional trade cluster. Although LAC maintains and even increases its global export weight (Table 1), the structural configuration of the network indicates that regional countries remain externally oriented in their trade embedding. Figure 1 - Global copper concentrate trade network and centrality structure, 2010 34
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