Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

In this paper we study how the topology of the International Trade Network (ITN) changes in geographical space, and along time. We employ geographical distance between countries in the World to filter the links in the ITN, building a sequence of sub-networks, each one featuring trade links occurring at similar distance. We then test if the assortativity

and clustering of ITN subnetworks changes as distance increases, and we nd that this is indeed the case: distance strongly impacts, in a non-linear way, the topology of the ITN.We show that the ITN is disassortative at long distances while it is assortative …