  This paper studies the statistical properties of the web of import-export
relationships among world countries using a weighted-network approach. We
analyze how the distributions of the most important network statistics
measuring connectivity, assortativity, clustering and centrality have
co-evolved over time. We show that all node-statistic distributions and their
correlation structure have remained surprisingly stable in the last 20 years --
and are likely to do so in the future. Conversely, the distribution of
(positive) link weights is slowly moving from a log-normal density towards a
power law. We also characterize the autoregressive properties of
network-statistics dynamics. We find that network-statistics growth rates are
well-proxied by fat-tailed densities like the Laplace or the asymmetric
exponential-power. Finally, we find that all our results are reasonably robust
to a few alternative, economically-meaningful, weighting schemes.
