title: World-trade web: topological properties, dynamics, and evolution.
abstract: This paper studies the statistical properties of the web of import-export relationships among world countries using a weighted-network approach. We analyze how the distributions of the most important network statistics measuring connectivity, assortativity, clustering, and centrality have coevolved over time. We show that all node-statistic distributions and their correlation structure have remained surprisingly stable in the last 20 years -and are likely to do so in the future. Conversely, the distribution of (positive) link weights is slowly moving from a log-normal density towards a power law. We also characterize the autoregressive properties of network-statistics dynamics. We find that network-statistics growth rates are well-proxied by fat-tailed densities like the Laplace or the asymmetric exponential power. Finally, we find that all our results are reasonably robust to a few alternative, economically meaningful, weighting schemes.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Economics and Management, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Piazza Martiri della Libertà 33, I-56127 Pisa, Italy. giorgio.fagiolo@sssup.it
authors.forename: Giorgio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Fagiolo
authors.forename: Javier
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Reyes
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schiavo