This trade dependencies work builds on joint research with Isabelle Mejean (Sciences Po), published as Chapter 3 of the Paris Report 2 Europe's Economic Security (CEPR/Bruegel, 2024), and on a contribution to the EIB Investment Report 2024/2025 (Chapter 5, Box C). Related work with Lionel Fontagné on defining and measuring value-chain resilience is under way as part of the evaluation of the France 2030 investment plan.
The Trade Dependency Atlas applies the Mejean–Rousseaux (2024) five-criteria methodology — originally developed at EU scale — at the level of individual economies, following Fontagné and Rousseaux (2026). It covers 232 economies, including the EU27 member states, the United Kingdom, and economies across all continents, over two pooled periods (2015–2019 and 2021–2024). It also introduces reverse dependency indicators measuring the export leverage each economy holds over others.
The atlas is built entirely on open data (BACI CEPII, Eurostat Prodcom, World Bank, ECB) and open-source code (R, D3.js). All data and code are available upon request for academic purposes.
The goal is for this atlas to become a reference resource for researchers, policymakers, and journalists working on trade dependencies, economic security, and strategic autonomy.
The absorption criterion (criterion 4 in Mejean and Rousseaux, 2024) requires domestic production data at the product level. Currently, this is available only for:
For all other economies, only the three EC criteria and the stickiness criterion are applied. This means that the dependency lists for non-EU/UK economies are likely upper bounds of the true vulnerable set.
For enquiries about the methodology, the underlying data, the product lists, or potential collaboration:
Full product lists for all methodologies and all economies are available upon request for academic purposes.
This atlas, its underlying data, and its methodology are the intellectual property of Pierre Rousseaux. All rights reserved. Academic and research use may be granted upon request — please contact pierre.rousseaux@ensae.fr. Any authorised use requires proper citation of the works below. Commercial use, redistribution, or derivative works are not permitted without prior written permission.
Any authorised use of this atlas must cite the following works: