  The large-scale organization of the world economies is exhibiting
increasingly levels of local heterogeneity and global interdependency.
Understanding the relation between local and global features calls for
analytical tools able to uncover the global emerging organization of the
international trade network. Here we analyze the world network of bilateral
trade imbalances and characterize its overall flux organization, unraveling
local and global high-flux pathways that define the backbone of the trade
system. We develop a general procedure capable to progressively filter out in a
consistent and quantitative way the dominant trade channels. This procedure is
completely general and can be applied to any weighted network to detect the
underlying structure of transport flows. The trade fluxes properties of the
world trade web determines a ranking of trade partnerships that highlights
global interdependencies, providing information not accessible by simple local
analysis. The present work provides new quantitative tools for a dynamical
approach to the propagation of economic crises.
