Since then, virtual water has been widely used as a quantitative evaluation indicator of the “water” production chain for resource inputs, commodity trade, and economic output, and has played an important role in exploring the mechanisms of water flows in the context of economic trade. In 1993, Tony Allan introduced the concept of virtual water, which is the amount of water needed to produce products and services or the virtual water embedded in the product and service volume. Studies have shown that water scarcity and water pollution problems will continue to intensify in the coming decades, thus causing a series of problems such as limiting economic development, lack of environmental sustainability, and food insecurity. As a result, many countries and regions are experiencing water shortages of varying degrees, which has become a major challenge facing the world in the 21st century. With the development of economies and the increase in population, the global demand for water resources continues to increase, and human beings make unreasonable developments of water resources. Finally, we point out that meritocratic links, path dependence, reciprocity, and transmissive links have extreme explanatory power for the evolutionary development of virtual water networks. The results partially support the theoretical content of water endowment and traditional gravity models, finding that trade networks are expanding to farther and larger markets, confirming that national water scarcity levels do not impact the evolution of virtual water trade networks. Our results support the theoretical hypothesis of ecologically unequal exchange and trade drivers, arguing that virtual water flows from less developed countries to developed countries under global free trade and that unequal trade patterns lead to excessive consumption of virtual water in less developed countries. We constructed virtual water trade networks for 62 countries worldwide from 2000 to 2015 and used an innovative combination of multi-regional input–output data and stochastic actor-oriented models for analytical purposes. This paper aims to fill this critical gap by developing a research framework to explore how endogenous network structures and external factors have influenced the evolution of virtual water trade networks. No study has yet explored the structural characteristics and drivers of the evolution of global virtual water trade networks from a network structure evolution perspective. The globalization of trade has caused tremendous pressure on water resources globally, and a virtual water trade provides a new perspective on global freshwater sharing and water sustainability.
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