Fitness-dependent topological properties of the World Trade Web

Many systems of different nature exhibit scale free behaviors. Economic systems with power law distribution in the wealth is one of the examples. To better understand the working behind the complexity, we undertook an empirical study measuring the interactions between market participants. A Web server was setup to administer the exchange of futures contracts whose liquidation prices were coupled to event outcomes. After free registration, participants started trading to compe...

We study the effect of globalization of world economy between 1980 and 2010 by using network analysis technics on trade and GDP data of 71 countries in the world. We draw results distinguishing relatively developing and relatively developed countries during this period of time and point out the standing out economies among the BRICS countries during the years of globalization: within our context of study, China and Russia are the countries that already exhibit developed econo...

This paper employs a weighted network approach to study the empirical properties of the web of trade relationships among world countries, and its evolution over time. We show that most countries are characterized by weak trade links; yet, there exists a group of countries featuring a large number of strong relationships, thus hinting to a core-periphery structure. The World Trade Web (WTW) is characterized by the following representation: a directed graph connecting world Cou...

Preferential attachment is the most popular explanation for the emergence of scaling behavior in the World Wide Web, but this explanation has been challenged by the global information hypothesis, the existence of linear preference and the emergence of new big internet companies in the real world. We notice that most websites have an obvious feature that their pages are organized as a tree (namely hidden tree) and hence propose a new model that introduces a hidden tree structu...

Within the last fifteen years, network theory has been successfully applied both to natural sciences and to socioeconomic disciplines. In particular, bipartite networks have been recognized to provide a particularly insightful representation of many systems, ranging from mutualistic networks in ecology to trade networks in economy, whence the need of a pattern detection-oriented analysis in order to identify statistically-significant structural properties. Such an analysis re...

In self-organizing networks, topology and dynamics coevolve in a continuous feedback, without exogenous driving. The World Trade Network (WTN) is one of the few empirically well documented examples of self-organizing networks: its topology strongly depends on the GDP of world countries, which in turn depends on the structure of trade. Therefore, understanding which are the key topological properties of the WTN that deviate from randomness provides direct empirical information...

We address the problem of gauging the influence exerted by a given country on the global trade market from the viewpoint of complex networks. In particular, we apply the PWP method for computing indirect influences on the world trade network.

Considerable efforts have been made in recent years to produce detailed topologies of the Internet. Although Internet topology data have been brought to the attention of a wide and somewhat diverse audience of scholars, so far they have been overlooked by economists. In this paper, we suggest that such data could be effectively treated as a proxy to characterize the size of the "digital economy" at country level and outsourcing: thus, we analyse the topological structure of t...

Approaches from statistical physics are applied to investigate the structure of network models whose growth rules mimic aspects of the evolution of the world-wide web. We first determine the degree distribution of a growing network in which nodes are introduced one at a time and attach to an earlier node of degree k with rate A_ksim k^gamma. Very different behaviors arise for gamma<1, gamma=1, and gamma>1. We also analyze the degree distribution of a heterogeneous network, th...

We performed a large-scale crawl of the World Wide Web, covering 6.9 Million domains and 57 Million subdomains, including all high-traffic sites of the Internet. We present a study of the correlations found between quantities measuring the structural relevance of each node in the network (the in- and out-degree, the local clustering coefficient, the first-neighbor in-degree and the Alexa rank). We find that some of these properties show strong correlation effects and that the...