This paper studies the topological properties of the World Trade Web (WTW) and its evolution over time by employing a weighted-network analysis. We show that the WTW, viewed as a weighted network, displays statistical features that are very different from those obtained by using a traditional...

We study the community structure of the multi-network of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992–2003 period. We compare structures across commodities and time by means of the normalized mutual information index (NMI). We also compare them with exogenous...

This paper studies international migration from a complex-network perspective. We define the international-migration network (IMN) as the weighted-directed graph where nodes are world countries and links account for the stock of migrants originated in a given country and living in another...

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...

Based on the misleading expectation that weighted network properties always offer a more complete description than purely topological ones, current economic models of the International Trade Network (ITN) generally aim at explaining local weighted properties, not local binary ones. Here we...

In all empirical-network studies, the observed properties of economic networks are informative only if compared with a well-defined null model that can quantitatively predict the behavior of such properties in constrained graphs. However, predictions of the available null-model methods can be...

This paper investigates whether the gravity model (GM) can explain the statistical properties of the International Trade Network (ITN). We fit data on international-trade flows with a GM specification using alternative fitting techniques and we employ GM estimates to build a weighted predicted...

This paper investigates whether the gravity model (GM) can explain the statistical properties of the International Trade Network (ITN). We fit data on international-trade flows with a GM specification using alternative fitting techniques and we employ GM estimates to build a weighted predicted...

In all empirical-network studies, the observed properties of economic networks are informative only if compared with a well-defined null model that can quantitatively predict the behavior of such properties in constrained graphs. However, predictions of the available null-model methods can be...

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...