Trade-related Vulnerabilities and the Controversial Boundaries of Member States’ Economic Security in the EU

Growing geopolitical tensions have renewed interest in trade-related vulnerabilities as a component of economic security. However, the lack of a well-defined conceptual framework around the concept of economic security implies the co-existence of different definitions, shifting boundaries and fuzzy policy prescriptions. Recent empirical work has developed product-level indicators of external dependence, typically combining information on import concentration, global supply concentration, and domestic substitutability. These methodologies are generally designed either for sovereign States or for the European Union treated as a single integrated area. This paper argues that they cannot be directly replicated to assess vulnerabilities at the level of individual EU Member States. The paper's methodological contribution shows that the EU's quasi-federal nature creates specific conceptual and measurement problems for Member State assessments, especially concerning the treatment of intra-EU sourcing in the construction of concentration and substitutability indicators. These choices affect the internal coherence of vulnerability metrics and reflect prior judgments about whether the relevant threat is economic coercion, broader supply disruption, or both. An empirical section applies one of the existing methodologies to highly disaggregated trade data to illustrate the impact of alternative treatments of intra-EU trade and compare different results.