  For centuries, national economies created wealth by engaging in international
trade and production. The resulting international supply networks not only
increase wealth for countries, but also create systemic risk: economic shocks,
triggered by company failures in one country, may propagate to other countries.
Using global supply network data on the firm-level, we present a method to
estimate a country's exposure to direct and indirect economic losses caused by
the failure of a company in another country. We show the network of systemic
risk-flows across the world. We find that rich countries expose poor countries
much more to systemic risk than the other way round. We demonstrate that higher
systemic risk levels are not compensated with a risk premium in GDP, nor do
they correlate with economic growth. Systemic risk around the globe appears to
be distributed more unequally than wealth. These findings put the often praised
benefits for developing countries from globalized production in a new light,
since they relate them to the involved risks in the production processes.
Exposure risks present a new dimension of global inequality, that most affects
the poor in supply shock crises. It becomes fully quantifiable with the
proposed method.
