Trade synchronization in the World Trade Web

Abstract

In March 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers marked for many the beginning of the global crisis. In an increasingly globalized world, the financial crisis spread relentlessly. Recent theories of financial fragility link globalization with economic cycles, i.e. when local crises coincide with bad credit regulation and failures in international monetary arrangements. The globalization process in recent years has been accelerated due to to the increase of international trade. Here we analyze how economic cycles can spread worldwide over the global trade network (WTW). We use the WTW network structure to simulate a network of Integrate-and-Fire oscillators for two different years, 1980 and 2000. The results reinforce the idea that globalization accelerates the global synchronization process.