This book has argued that emerging markets can improve or darken their futures through the ties they make in the international community. All else being equal, portfolio investors pay attention to the company that a country keeps – and how closely that company is allegedly kept. Default risk can be magnified across the members of an international economic organization, particularly when it comes to determining a country's willingness, not its ability, to pay its debt.

Chapter 2 laid out the theoretical foundation for why international economic organizations change perceptions of emerging markets' future behavior. Drawing from sociology and management theory, I argue that the membership content of international organizations will change investor perceptions of country risk – separately from anything that those organizations ask countries to do, or enforcement of behavior, or propensities for countries to join other like-minded groups. In part as a heuristic, the reputations of better-known members will spill over into perceptions of other members of an international group. The changes in risk perceptions will vary depending on the proposed closeness of the association (a proxy for the public nature of the announcement and the seriousness of intensions) and the extremity of its members' political quality. Political risk, I argue, is an indicator of an emerging market's willingness, not ability, to service its debt – and this information is especially valuable in pricing emerging-market sovereign risk.