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.