  In the current era of worldwide stock market interdependencies, the global
financial village has become increasingly vulnerable to systemic collapse. The
recent global financial crisis has highlighted the necessity of understanding
and quantifying interdependencies among the world's economies, developing new
effective approaches to risk evaluation, and providing mitigating solutions. We
present a methodological framework for quantifying interdependencies in the
global market and for evaluating risk levels in the world-wide financial
network. The resulting information will enable policy and decision makers to
better measure, understand, and maintain financial stability. We use the
methodology to rank the economic importance of each industry and country
according to the global damage that would result from their failure. Our
quantitative results shed new light on China's increasing economic dominance
over other economies, including that of the USA, to the global economy.
