%0 Journal Article
%T Detecting the bipartite World Trade Web evolution across 2007: a motifs-based analysis
%A Fabio Saracco
%A Riccardo Di Clemente
%A Andrea Gabrielli
%A Tiziano Squartini
%J Quantitative Finance
%D 2015
%I arXiv
%X In the present paper we employ the theoretical tools developed in network theory, in order to shed light on the response of world wide trade to the financial crisis of 2007. In particular, we have explored the evolution of the bipartite country-product World Trade Web across the years 1995-2010, monitoring the behaviour of the system both before and after 2007. Remarkably, our results indicate that, from 2003 on, the abundances of a recently-defined class of bipartite motifs assume values progressively closer to the ones predicted by a null model which preserves only basic features of the observed structure, completely randomizing the rest. In other words, as 2007 approaches the World Trade Web becomes more and more compatible with the picture of a bipartite network where correlations between countries and products are progressively lost. Moreover, the trends characterizing the z-scores of the considered family of motifs suggest that the most evident modification in the structure of the world trade network can be considered as concluded in 2010, after a seemingly stationary phase of three years. In the second part of the paper, we have refined our analysis by considering subsets of nodes regarded in the literature as sharing similar economic traits: while the evolution of certain subgroups of countries and products confirms the trends highlighted by the global motifs, other groupings show a behavior compatible with our null model throughout the whole period 1995-2010, thus questioning the economic relevance traditionally assigned to these groups.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03533v1