Bridging nestedness and economic complexity in multilayer world trade networks

This paper uses a multilayer network approach to model the international trading system, where each layer represents a product's transnational trading relations. The authors find a nested structure within each layer, leading to a new measure of product complexity that aligns better with common understanding. Nestedness correlates with asymmetric export relations due to technology barriers, and the evolution of product complexity shows that nestedness grows faster than relevance decays. A comparison of China and the US trade competitiveness reveals different evolutionary trends, and an aggregated nestedness index predicts a nation's future economic growth.

Zhuo-Ming Ren, An Zeng, Yi-Cheng Zhang