Classification of Internal and External Economic Threats: A Structured Review and Typology for Economic Security Analysis

Background. Governments, central banks and international organizations routinely speak of threats to economic security, yet the term is used loosely. Distinguishing internal threats, which originate within a national economy, from external threats, which originate beyond its borders, is a foundational step in risk assessment, but existing classifications are fragmented across macroeconomics, finance, political economy and security studies. Objective. This article develops and tests a classification of economic threats using origin as the primary criterion and supplements it with secondary criteria: nature, transmission channel, time horizon and controllability. Methods. A structured conceptual review of the economic-crisis, vulnerability and economic-security literatures was carried out. Threat categories were derived inductively, organized in a two-level typology, and then applied to five historical and contemporary episodes: the 1997–98 Asian crisis, the 2008 global financial crisis, the COVID-19 shock, the 2022 energy shock and the 2026 outlook as described by the IMF. Results. Seven internal threat classes (fiscal, monetary and price, financial-sector, structural, institutional, social-distributional and policy-uncertainty) and seven external classes (trade and terms-of-trade, capital-flow and exchange-rate, global financial contagion, external-debt, geopolitical and sanctions, supply-chain and technological dependence, and global physical shocks) were identified. In every episode examined, the severity of damage depended less on the origin of the shock than on the interaction between an external trigger and pre-existing internal vulnerability. Conclusions. Origin-based classification is necessary but not sufficient. A useful typology must be paired with an assessment of vulnerability and transmission. A third, hybrid class, in which internal weaknesses convert external shocks into crises, is proposed to capture this interaction, and a monitoring framework is outlined.