  Trade is a fundamental pillar of economy and a form of social organization.
Its empirical characterization at the worldwide scale is represented by the
World Trade Web (WTW), the network built upon the trade relationships between
the different countries. Several scientific studies have focused on the
structural characterization of this network, as well as its dynamical
properties, since we have registry of the structure of the network at different
times in history. In this paper we study an abstract scenario for the
development of global crises on top of the structure of connections of the WTW.
Assuming a cyclic dynamics of national economies and the interaction of
different countries according to the import-export balances, we are able to
investigate, using a simple model of pulse-coupled oscillators, the
synchronization phenomenon of crises at the worldwide scale. We focus on the
level of synchronization measured by an order parameter at two different
scales, one for the global system and another one for the mesoscales defined
through the topology. We use the WTW network structure to simulate a network of
Integrate-and-Fire oscillators for six different snapshots between years 1950
and 2000. The results reinforce the idea that globalization accelerates the
global synchronization process, and the analysis at a mesoscopic level shows
that this synchronization is different before and after globalization periods:
after globalization, the effect of communities is almost inexistent.
