The World Trade Web: Structure, evolution and modeling

The World Trade Web (WTW) is the complex network representation of the international trade system that allows an analysis at the large scale from an interdisciplinary approach. Countries are represented as nodes and commercial relations between them as links. The network representation offers a new level of description that goes beyond the country-specific analyses used in more traditional economic studies of trade. In particular, it makes possible the analysis of the indirect trade interactions among world countries. In this line of research, several tools and methodologies that have been recently developed for the analysis of any type of networks can be exploited to extract information from the WTW, and to discriminate which properties signal a nontrivial structural organization and which are likely to be originated by chance or structural constraints. Although these results have been obtained recently, and during a relatively short period of time, they have already established various robust empirical signatures of the international trade network. In some cases, these