Community Structure and Dynamics of the Industry Sector-Specific International-Trade-Network

We analyzed the industry sector-specific international trade data from 1995 to 2011 to clarify the structure and dynamics of communities that consist of industry sectors in various countries linked by international trade. We applied conventional community analysis to each time slice of the international trade network, and then identified the links between communities in adjoining years by using the World Input-Output Database. This database contains the industry sector specific international trade data on 41 countries and 35 industry sectors. The identified link structure shows that a triple backbone structure exists in the international trade network. We used the Hilbert transform to evaluate the phase time series of the growth rate of value added for 1435 nodes and then estimated the complex order parameters for communities. The respective amplitude for the order parameter of each community was observed to be greater than the amplitude for all sectors. This means active trade produces higher phase coherence within each community. Phase coherence decreased gradually in the late 1990´s but increased sharply in 2001 and 2002.