Subject and purpose of work: The economic crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic was fundamentally different from those of the past, with unforeseen implication on supply chains and European trade. As the literature regarding the pandemic is vast bibliometric techniques were used to find the most influential themes and authors. The aim of this paper is to test if cascading failure is possible when shocks arise in European trade. Materials and methods: To characterise the European commerce, network analysis was employed using Eurostat data of imports and exports in the following years: 2018, 2019 and 2020. Trade value indices were also used to characterised European trade during the pandemic and Enterprise Survey run by World Bank for in-depth, cross economies comparisons. Results: The results from the network analysis characterise the compactness of the network, showing that the European trade network is characterised by robustness. Conclusions: Cascading failure has a low probability of occurrence.

International trade is an important pillar of the modern economy. Beyond its benefits, the global market generates divergencies among trade partners that can be escalated into trade disputes. Notable interest has arisen in using network analysis to formally describe interactions with concepts derived from the graph theory. As we have noticed a less explored area on the graphical representation of trade dispute data, the purpose of this paper is to build, visualize, and analyze the trade disputes as a weighted network. We use data about trade disputes provided by the Word Trade Organization from 1995 to 31 January 2022 as this is a major regulatory body within the multilateral trading system. Our aim is to address the question on which countries are using the most the dispute settlement mechanism. Based on the association complainant – respondent, we map these interactions to obtain a weighted network that includes 75 countries, 247 unidirectional country pairs and 652 trade disputes. The results indicate the dominance of the United States as the main hub followed by the European Union and a core-periphery structure of the trade dispute network with less participation from smaller countries. Our study is a general assessment of trade disputes which contributes to identifying patterns on the positional changes of countries and their involvement as complainant and respondent respectively in international dispute settlement.