http://www.nature.com/articles/srep30286
Detecting early signs of the 2007–2008 crisis in the world trade
Since 2007, several contributions have tried to identify early-warning signals of the financial crisis.
However, the vast majority of analyses has focused on financial systems and little theoretical work
has been done on the economic counterpart. In the present paper we ll this gap and employ the
theoretical tools of network theory to shed light on the response of world trade to the financial crisis of
2007 and the economic recession of 2008–2009. We have explored the evolution of the bipartite World
Trade Web (WTW) across the years 1995–2010, monitoring the behavior of the system both before and
after 2007. Our analysis shows early structural changes in the WTW topology: since 2003, the WTW
becomes increasingly compatible with the picture of a network where correlations between countries
and products are progressively lost. Moreover, the WTW structural modi cation can be considered
as concluded in 2010, after a seemingly stationary phase of three years. We have also re ned our analysis by considering specific subsets of countries and products: the most statistically significant early-warning signals are provided by the most volatile macrosectors, especially when measured on developing countries, suggesting the emerging economies as being the most sensitive ones to the global economic cycles.