Universal scaling behaviour in weighted trade networks

Identifying universal patterns in complex economic systems can reveal the dynamics and organizing principles underlying the process of system evolution. We investigate the scaling behaviours that have emerged in the international trade system by describing them as a series of evolving weighted trade networks. The maximum-flow spanning trees (constructed by maximizing the total weight of the edges) of these networks exhibit two universal scaling exponents: (1) topological scaling exponent η = 1.30 and (2) flow scaling exponent ζ = 1.03.