Against the backdrop of the contagion literature, the paper analyses the impact of financial and trade linkages on sovereign bond spreads in the Eurozone crisis. Using quarterly data for a sample of EMU countries during the period 2000–13, we estimate fixed‐effect panel models with Driscoll and Kraay standard errors that are robust to general forms of spatial and temporal dependence. Our main results can be summarised as follows: first, we suggest that the ‘sudden stop’ of capital inflow towards the peripheral sovereign debt triggered a re‐segmentation of financial markets and economic systems along national borders, with negative implications for risk‐sharing and the efficient allocation of capital. The ‘home bias’ effect – that is the increase in the share of sovereign debt held by domestic banks – worsened the country‐specific risk because the twin crisis (sovereign and banking) began to be conceived as more closely intertwined within countries than before. Second, the structure of international trade helps to account for the geographic scope of contagion, even after controlling for macroeconomic and fiscal vulnerabilities. Finally, the ‘substitution effect’ of public debt securities of stand‐alone emerging countries has affected more the sovereign spreads in the core than in the periphery.

This chapter focuses on the decoupling hypothesis between emerging countries and the advanced world. On the basis of quarterly seasonally adjusted data over the period 1995q1–2014q1 we present some evidence in favor of a decreasing vulnerability of emerging market economies to global economic and financial development, particularly convincing for Asian countries. Results confirm a common finding in the related literature: The acute phase of the financial crisis triggered by the US mortgage crisis corresponds to a period of substantial increase in business cycle synchronization, arguably determined by the synchronized trade collapse and foreign credit retrenchment, although in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, all the different groups of emerging economies started to decouple again from the United States, and also relative to the Eurozone and to Japan. Therefore, extending the time span to recent data allows us to envisage the recoupling phase with respect to the United States' business cycle as a temporary halt over a long-run decoupling initiated a decade ago.