Structure and Response in the World Trade Network

We examine how the structure of the world trade network has been shaped by globalization and recessions over the last 40 years. We show that by treating the world trade network as an evolving system, theory predicts the trade network is more sensitive to evolutionary shocks and recovers more slowly from them now than it did 40 years ago, due to structural changes in the world trade network induced by globalization. We also show that recession-induced change to the world trade network leads to an \emph{increased} hierarchical structure of the global trade network for a few years after the recession.
Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett