  We examine how the structure of the world trade network has been shaped by
globalization and recessions over the last 40 years. We show that by treating
the world trade network as an evolving system, theory predicts the trade
network is more sensitive to evolutionary shocks and recovers more slowly from
them now than it did 40 years ago, due to structural changes in the world trade
network induced by globalization. We also show that recession-induced change to
the world trade network leads to an \emph{increased} hierarchical structure of
the global trade network for a few years after the recession.
