Patterns of dominant flows in the world trade web

By M. Ángeles Serrano, Marián Boguñá, Alessandro Vespignani. 2007

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The large-scale organization of the world economies is exhibiting increasing levels of local heterogeneity and global interdependency. Understanding the relation between local and global features calls for analytical tools able to uncover the global emerging organization of the international trade network. Here we analyze the world network of bilateral trade imbalances and characterize its overall flux organization, unraveling local and global high-flux pathways that define the backbone of the trade system. We develop a general procedure capable to progressively filter out in a consistent and quantitative way the dominant trade channels. This procedure is completely general and can be applied to any weighted network to detect the underlying structure of transport flows. The trade fluxes properties of the world trade web determine a ranking of trade partnerships that highlights global interdependencies, providing information not accessible by simple local analysis. The present work provides new quantitative tools for a dynamical approach to the propagation of economic crises.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f51dacdc42d8adff1799a2ff25f1d2872182579e

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Citations in the corpus

The World Trade Network (2011, unknown): “This ‘disassortative’ nature of the trade network is evident both studying the unweighted network and the weighted one.17 Serrano et al. (2007) also using a weighted trade network find high global and local heterogeneity not only among countries, but also in trade flow characteristics.”
International trade and financial integration: a weighted network analysis (2010, methodology): “The web of international trade relations has also been widely used as a case study in a number of papers in the physics domain (Serrano and Boguñá 2003, Garlaschelli and Loffredo 2004, Serrano et al. 2007).”
The evolution of the world trade web: a weighted-network analysis (2010, methodology): “A similar approach has been adopted by Li et al. (2003), Bhattacharya et al. (2007b), Bhattacharya et al. (2007a) and Serrano et al. (2007).”
Universal patterns of inequality (2009, background): “The analogy between energy and money is mentioned in some physics textbooks [7], but not developed in detail.”