  Throughout economic history, the global economy has experienced recurring
crises. The persistent recurrence of such economic crises calls for an
understanding of their generic features rather than treating them as singular
events. The global economic system is a highly complex system and can best be
viewed in terms of a network of interacting macroeconomic agents. In this
regard, from the perspective of collective network dynamics, here we explore
how the topology of global macroeconomic network affects the patterns of
spreading of economic crises. Using a simple toy model of crisis spreading, we
demonstrate that an individual country's role in crisis spreading is not only
dependent on its gross macroeconomic capacities, but also on its local and
global connectivity profile in the context of the world economic network. We
find that on one hand clustering of weak links at the regional scale can
significantly aggravate the spread of crises, but on the other hand the current
network structure at the global scale harbors a higher tolerance of extreme
crises compared to more "globalized" random networks. These results suggest
that there can be a potential hidden cost in the ongoing globalization movement
towards establishing less-constrained, trans-regional economic links between
countries, by increasing the vulnerability of global economic system to extreme
crises.
