The Architecture of Weighted World Trade Network

World trade network is a typical complex economic network, the magnitudes of trade flows in the network are greatly diverse, so that the simple analysis of topological structure cannot depicts correctly the structural characteristics of world trade network. This paper constitutes the weighted world trade network by assigning the amount of trade flows to the edges of the network, and studies the structural characteristics of weighted network from four perspectives: degree-strength correlations, edge weight disparity, clustering and mixing patterns. Comparative analysis with topological structure discloses some new findings, such as the mixing pattern is disassortative in topological structure while assortative in weighted structure. The results show that the analysis of weighted network could depict more information for economic flow network.