Exploring Evolution of International Trade Networks: Overview of Data Preprocessing Issues

Abstract

For decades network analysis methods have been successfully used by scholars to investigate international trade evolution and to substantially enrich existing body of knowledge on dynamics of export and import flows. However, there is a range of problems with international trade data too often not mentioned even in scientific publications. Thus, this paper aims to address a discussion among historians on the pitfalls of data preprocessing and its quality assessment before building network models.