The economic literature examining the trade- growth nexus has exploited a variety of measures of trade intensity while generally ignoring the complex network aspect of international trade flows. This study places the network structure of international trade at the centre of the analysis, exploiting tools from network science to examine the relationship. This paper characterizes the edge weights of the world trade web using measures of bilateral trade intensity from the recent economic literature thereby: i) clarifying the relationships between various measures of trade intensity and ii) elucidating the relationship between trade integration and growth. Trade integration has a greater impact on real growth in cross-sectional and Generalized Methods of Moments dynamic (GMM) panel estimation. In “within” estimations the relationship between trade and growth is masked; implying mixed results at the individual country level. Increasingly integrated developed countries did not experience significant trade-induced growth over the sample period 1990 -2014.

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