trade system and can highlight some important flaws in standard macroeconomic modeling. Previous investigations of the international trade network revealed similarities but also differences across the layers of the multiplex (at both binary and weighted levels) [@BariFagiGarla2010]. Moreover, increased product complexity appears to yield increased product-specific network complexity [@debene_sectoral]. Finally, the country-product associations reveal a highly nontrivial nested structure [@pietronero] which contradicts the mainstream economic expectation and, similarly, the product-product network displays a strong core-periphery structure [@hidalgo]. These product-related heterogeneities imply that it is not obvious whether one should expect that the results obtained on a single, aggregate instance of the WTW are robust over time and across different commodity classes.

Given the importance of the problem and its more general implications for the understanding of economic networks, in this paper we carry out an in-depth investigation of the WTW spanning several years and different commodities. Our results show that, when considered together, the total trade (strength) and the number of trade partners (degree) of all world countries are enough in order to reproduce many higher-order properties of the network, for all levels of disaggregation and all temporal snapshots in our analysis. In order to fully explain the structure of 