Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 18: Networks II (with SOE)

DY 18.7: Talk

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 12:00–12:15, H 0110

The informativeness of local constraints in the structure of the global trade network — •Tiziano Squartini¹, Giorgio Fagiolo², and Diego Garlaschelli¹ — ¹Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Leiden, Niels Bohrweg 2, NL-2333 CA Leiden, The Netherlands — ²LEM, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, ITALY

The network of international trade relationships, or World Trade Web (WTW), has received renewed multidisciplinary interest due to recent advances in network theory. However, it is still unclear whether the network approach conveys additional, nontrivial information with respect to traditional international-economics analyses that describe world trade only in terms of local country-specific properties. In this work we use a recent randomization method to assess in detail the role that local structural properties have in shaping higher-order patterns of the WTW in all its possible representations (binary/weighted, directed/undirected, aggregated/disaggregated) and across several years. We find that all higher-order properties observed in the binary description can be completely traced back to the degree sequence, which is therefore maximally informative. This implies that the degree sequence, which is currently neglected by economic models, should instead become among the focuses of theories. By contrast, the weighted patterns of the WTW cannot be completely explained by local properties, which are therefore of limited informativeness. Indirect weighted trade interactions are not simply combinations of direct ones, and can only be successfully captured by the network description of trade.