Interplay between topology and dynamics in the World Trade Web

D. Garlaschelli (), T. Di Matteo, T. Aste, G. Caldarelli and M. I. Loffredo

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2007, vol. 57, issue 2, 159-164

Abstract: We present an empirical analysis of the network formed by the trade relationships between all world countries, or World Trade Web (WTW). Each (directed) link is weighted by the amount of wealth flowing between two countries, and each country is characterized by the value of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By analysing a set of year-by-year data covering the time interval 1950–2000, we show that the dynamics of all GDP values and the evolution of the WTW (trade flow and topology) are tightly coupled. The probability that two countries are connected depends on their GDP values, supporting recent theoretical models relating network topology to the presence of a `hidden' variable (or fitness). On the other hand, the topology is shown to determine the GDP values due to the exchange between countries. This leads us to a new framework where the fitness value is a dynamical variable determining, and at the same time depending on, network topology in a continuous feedback. Copyright EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag 2007

Keywords: 89.75.Hc Networks and genealogical trees; 89.65.-s Social and economic systems; 87.23.Ge Dynamics of social systems; 02.50.-r Probability theory; stochastic processes; and statistics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00131-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:57:y:2007:i:2:p:159-164

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2007-00131-6

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().