Communicability and Communities in Complex Socio-Economic Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new measure called communicability for analyzing impact propagation and community structures in socio-economic networks, accounting for external stresses like economic crises.

Contribution

It proposes a novel communicability function and the concept of temperature to study community dynamics and external influences in socio-economic networks.

Findings

Identified 27 communities with varying overlaps in a trade network.

Found 5 key communities related to geopolitical relationships.

External stress impacts community structure, isolating countries during crises.

Abstract

The concept of communicability is introduced for complex socio-economic networks. The communicability function expresses how an impact propagates from one place to another in the network. This function is used to define unambiguously the concept of socio-economic community. The concept of temperature in complex socio-economic networks is also introduced as a way of accounting for the external stresses to which such systems are submitted. This external stress can change dramatically the structure of the communities in a network. We analyze here a trade network of countries exporting 'miscellaneous manufactures of metal.' We determine the community structure of this network showing that there are 27 communities with diverse degree of overlapping. When only communities with less than 80% of overlap are considered we found 5 communities which are well characterized in terms of geopolitical relationships. The analysis of external stress on these communities reveals that several countries are very much influenced by these critical situations, i.e., economical crisis. These weakest links are clearly identified and represent countries that are isolated from the main trade as soon as the external "temperature" of the system is increased. The current approach adds an important tool for the analysis of socio-economic networks in the real-world.