Capital-flow data shows where money moves. Financial dependence asks a different question: which economies become vulnerable when a particular flow, creditor group, currency or funding market changes. The distinction matters because the same gross capital movement can have very different consequences depending on the structure of the recipient economy.
The BondStats Global Financial Dependence Map is designed as a structural risk framework. It brings together external funding reliance, foreign-currency debt, creditor concentration, reserve-currency exposure and the role of portfolio financing. The purpose is not to label countries as safe or unsafe, but to make channels of dependence visible.
This is intentionally separate from the Global Capital Flow Map. The Capital Flow Map focuses on directional pressure and market attraction. The Dependence Map focuses on the balance-sheet relationships that make some flows more consequential than others.
Dependence can hide behind healthy headline numbers
An economy can have moderate public debt and still depend heavily on foreign bank funding, portfolio inflows or a single external currency. Another can run a large public debt stock but fund predominantly through domestic institutions in its own currency. Headline debt ratios therefore do not reveal the same vulnerability.
A dependence framework separates the channels so that external funding, currency mismatch and creditor concentration can be studied independently.
Funding currency is part of the risk
Borrowing in a currency that an economy does not control can create a second layer of exposure. A stronger funding currency can increase the local-currency burden of debt and tighten financial conditions even without a change in the original interest rate. This is one reason reserve currencies matter far beyond central-bank reserve portfolios.
The map therefore treats currency dependence as a structural connection between domestic balance sheets and the international monetary system.
From network map to stress transmission
The long-term value of the database is not simply visualization. By combining creditor concentration, external debt structure and funding-currency exposure, BondStats can study how a shock in one financial center might transmit through funding relationships into another market.
Any future BondStats dependence index should remain transparent about its construction and should be described as an analytical composite, not as an official measure or deterministic crisis forecast.