National Economic Status Inference from the World Trade Network

Quantifying the economic status of nations is significant for economic development. Apart from the traditional economic indicators, many new, granular and real-time economic indicators based on various socioeconomic and economic datasets are reported. In this paper, by employing the world trade data, we characterize the economic status from three dimensions, including the monetary dimension, the network structure dimension and the trade diversification dimension. The results show that network centrality indicators can explain up to 85.4% of the variance of the GDP, which perform best compared with indicators of the other two dimensions. The results show the importance of the network structure in inferencing the economic status of nations, and provide a new perspective for characterizing and understanding the national economic status.