Exploring the Dynamics of International Trade by Combining the Comparative Advantages of Multivariate Statistics and Network Visualization

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate in International Political Economy about the appropriateness of globalization, regionalization and macroeconomic imbalance theory by identifying quantitative estimates for all three tendencies from world trade data. This is achieved with a series of gravity models enhanced stepwise by the mapping of the estimation errors of a given model on representations of the overall structure of trade. This not only allows the identification of imperfections in a given model but also permits the further improvement of the models since any systematic regional organization in the error-terms can be identified. The results of the most elaborated model indicate that single factor explanations of global economic integration are presumably misleading. Instead, each of three explanations captures only part of the ongoing changes, as they can be identified under a comparative static perspective from world trade data.