Among the many changes that characterized the world trading system in the past decades, a very relevant and much discussed one concerns the role of the so-called \emerging countries." In this Chapter, we study the position of a number of "emerging countries" in the World Trade Network (WTN) in order to assess whether they are standing out from the rest of developing countries as far as the central position they occupy, making a comparison between local centrality measures and global centrality measures.

The case of China and Mexico are compared. The analysis shows that the core-periphery strutture of the WTN apparent in the mid-1990s is no longer so evident and that the number and relevance of trade connections of most emerging and developing countries has increased signicantly. Finally, we analyze whether the trade evolution of the emerging economies is related to their trade partnerships and to their position in the network, estimating the relationship between their centrality and their growth rates. Results indicate that centrality is positively and signicantly correlated to emerging countries’ growth rates.