UC Irvine

Currently, the world economy is experiencing a global trade crisis. Specifically, the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the operation of complex global trade networks that has led to a severe decline in global economic growth. This severe decline in global economic growth is bound to compound inequalities between and within nation-states. Yet little is still known about how the global trade network and its structural inequalities adapt and respond to the impact of a global economic crisis. This dissertation investigates the impact of the 2008-09 global economic crisis on the structure and dynamics of the global trade network. It addresses three questions central to sociological research on globalization and economic development: 1) How did the global trade network adapt and respond to the 2008-09 global economic crisis? 2) In what ways did the 2008-09 crisis affect economic inequalities between nation-states? 3) And, how did the 2008-09 crisis affect the dynamic interplay between the macro-level structure of the global trade network and economic productivity of nation-states? To address these questions, I situate my study within social network analysis and economic sociology to advance a large-scale and longitudinal quantitative study of the aggregate global trade network throughout the period of the 2008-09 global economic crisis. Exploring the effect of a global economic crisis on the structure and dynamics of the global trade network advances the discipline by providing a unique analytical foundation in which to study the impact of contemporary global economic crises on structural inequalities at the macro- and micro-level of the world economy. To achieve this end, I collected and constructed one of the largest data sets of international trade networks from data provided by the International Monetary Fund’s Direction-of-Trade Statistics, as well as econometric data from the World Bank’s Development Indicators database. Findings from this study illuminate three patterns related to globalization during the period of the 2008-09 global economic crisis. First, despite the devastating impact of the 2008-09 crisis on international trade, economic globalization continued to expand after the crisis, albeit not as high as in the pre-crisis era. Second, the global trade network not only conforms to a hierarchical core-periphery structure, but this structure was also robust to the impact of the 2008-09 crisis. Third, the presence of this structure was a significant predictor of national economic productivity after the 2008-09 crisis. Thus, the findings demonstrate that the expansion of globalization through international trade appeared undeterred by the crisis, and this expansion has facilitated the formation and stability of structural inequalities across the global trade network. These inequalities played a significant role in generating national economic productivity after the 2008-09 crisis.