Country risk: How the mighty are falling
Country risk: Country risk revisited
Country risk: Reasons for big changes
To obtain the overall country risk score, Euromoney sets a fixed weighting to the following nine categories. The best underlying value per category achieves the full weighting (25, 10 or 5); the worst scores zero. All other values are calculated relative to these two scores.
* Political risk (25% weighting): the risk of non-payment or non-servicing of payment for goods or services, loans, trade-related finance and dividends, and the non-repatriation of capital. Risk analysts give each country a score between 10 and zero: the higher, the better. This does not reflect the creditworthiness of individual counterparties.
* Economic performance (25%): from Euromoney's poll of economists. Each country scores an average of economic projections for 1999 and 2000. The higher that average, that better. Projections were unavailable for several countries, which therefore score zero in this category.
* Debt indicators (10%): calculated using the following ratios from the World Bank world debt tables 1998: total debt stocks to GNP (A), debt service to exports (B); current account balance to GNP (C). Figures are for 1996.