Rodrigo Mesa-Arango, Badri Narayanan, Satish V. Ukkusuri
International trade has evolved into global value chains, a worldwide network highly impacted by global crises. Since maritime transportation is the most important mode for international trade, it is significantly affected by these crises. However, describing the effects of crises in maritime-related trade is extremely challenging due to the multidimensional structure of this network and lack of accurate data. The Global Trade Analysis Project is an important source of information that provides international trade data for multiple regions, economic sectors, and modes around the globe. This paper explores this novel datasets and presents four contributions to literature: (1) proposing a novel representation of the maritime multi-commodity international trade network, (2) using statistical-network-analysis tools to describe the impact of global crises in this network, (3) demonstrating the benefits of this approach over traditional methods, (4) providing economic policy for maritime related global trade. Results show how countries and maritime-related economic sector adjust to global crises from a network perspective as international economy evolves.