DBS Country Risk Heatmap

Assessing EM macroeconomic risks

Welcome to DBS Country Risk Heatmaps. We showcase a cross section and a time series heatmap of a wide range of macro health indicators of 27 major emerging market economies. You can toggle between the Cross section and Time series tabs below to access the two heatmaps. The dynamic visualisations provide overall rankings to identify relative risks going forward using latest available data. In the time series heatmap, we provide the evolution of overall rankings over the past six years.

Many EMs have seen their cover for foreign obligations, saving-investment balance, and fiscal position weaken in recent years. Asia looks relatively healthy vs EM peers, despite China's structural challenges. Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Indonesia have some of the best scores regionally.

Latin American economies, alongside Pakistan, Hungary, Turkiye, and Egypt, have constantly had the worst scores. Energy exporters, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Russia score well. The analysis, by not capturing geopolitical risks, perhaps overstates Saudi Arabia and Taiwan's purported resilience to shocks.




Contact



Contact

Latest update: June 2024

Notes

  • The eight indicators in the heatmap are foreign exchange reserves, fiscal balance, private and public sector debt, external (hard currency) debt, savings-investment balance, gross external funding requirement, and real effective exchange rate (REER).
  • The vulnerabilities are assessed in simply ordering, except for REER:
    If country A's debt if higher than country B's debt, A scores poorer than B.
  • For REER, the absolute deviation of REER from long-term trend is used to capture risks from over/undervaluation.
  • Annual data provide the depth and breadth to monitor macro vulnerabilities that build up steadily over time.