International trade and economic growth : a network perspective.

Abstract

International trade is a complex network of import and export relationships, which is commonly referred to as the World Trade Network. It displays many topological characteristics that were recently suggested to be tightly related to the Gross Domestic Product of economies. There are four centrality measures commonly used in describing these characteristics, namely closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and degree centrality. In this paper, I explore the centrality measures of the trading networks of 28 product groups during the 1980-2006 period using the Trade and Production Database of the CEPII. I demonstrate how these measures are related to the economic growth in the long run and which of them performs the best in a wide range of economies.