2011/08 | LEM Working Paper Series | |
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Rewiring World Trade. Part I: A Binary Network Analysis |
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Tiziano Squartini, Giorgio Fagiolo, Diego Garlaschelli |
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Abstract | ||
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The international trade network (ITN) has received renewed
multidisciplinary interest due to recent advances in network
theory. However, it is still unclear whether a network approach
conveys additional, nontrivial information with respect to traditional
international-economics analyses that describe world trade only in
terms of local (rst-order) properties. In this and in a companion
paper, we employ a recently-proposed randomization method to assess in
detail the role that local properties have in shaping higher-order
patterns of the ITN in all its possible representations (binary/
weighted, directed/undirected, aggregated/disaggregated) and across
several years. Here we show that, remarkably, all the properties of
all binary projections of the network can be completely traced back to
the degree sequence, which is therefore maximally informative. Our
results imply that explaining the observed degree sequence of the ITN,
which has not received particular attention in economic theory, should
instead become one the main focuses of models of trade.
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