Map of the International Exposure of the Spanish Economy

This paper analyses the levels of interdependence and risk that take place in the economic relations between Spain and a large number of countries. Bilateral data on commercial and financial links between Spain and the rest of the world are used in order to build, by means of a Principal Components Analysis, an interdependence index between Spain and each country. Moreover, the aggregation by means of the same technique of several measures of risk, such as sovereign credit ratings and more general ones, enables to construct a risk index for each country. By combining the information of both indices, it is found that the greatest exposures of the Spanish economy occur with countries which are associated to low levels of risk (mainly the OECD), whereas the highest exposures that are related to intermediate levels of risk happen with Latin American countries and exporters of energy products