Self-organizing maps as a tool to compare financial macroeconomic imbalances: The European, Spanish and German case

The economic recession in the European countries during the current financial crisis and the widespread worsening of the financial situation have resulted in wide macroeconomic differences across countries. In this paper we use the method of self-organizing maps (SOM) to compare the macroeconomic financial imbalances among European countries. We detect different profiles of countries and identify the public expenditure and the saving rate as the most critical variables that impacts on the national financial situation. In addition, since several countries of the European Union have regions with some degree of economic and financial competences, we study the influence of the regions on the whole country. Thus, we classify and compare the Spanish and German regions and we prove the impact of the regional situation on the whole country situation.