arXiv · 2507.05048
Structure and dynamics jointly stabilize the international trade hypergraph
Abstract
To understand how fluctuations arise and are distributed in international trade, a question crucial for economic risk assessment and policymaking, we analyze strong adverse fluctuations-collapsed trades-defined as individual trades with sharp annual volume declines. Adopting a hypergraph framework for a fine-scale trade-centric representation of international trade, we find that collapsed trades (hyperedges) are clustered and their occurrence decays algebraically with trade volume (weight), which suggests inhomogeneous, epidemic-like spreading of collapse in the international trade hypergraph. Modeling collapse propagation as a contagion process and analyzing its dynamics, we show that a positive degree-weight correlation and a volume-decaying collapse rate synergistically suppress the onset of global collective collapse. Notably, the degree-weight correlation persisted but the volume-decay of the collapse rate weakened during the 2008-2009 global economic recession, resulting in a broader collapse spread. Our study shows how the interplay between structure and dynamics stabilizes complex systems.
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Jung-Ho Kim, Sudo Yi, Sang-Hwan Gwak, K. -I. Goh, D. -S. Lee. 2025-07-07. Structure and dynamics jointly stabilize the international trade hypergraph. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2026.117987
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