Country risk September 2008: Money talks in a world of risk
To obtain the overall country risk score, Euromoney assigns a weighting to nine categories. These are political risk (25% weighting), economic performance (25%), debt indicators (10%), debt in default or rescheduled (10%), credit ratings (10%), access to bank finance (5%), access to short-term finance (5%), access to capital markets (5%), forfaiting (5%).
• Political risk: 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.
• Economic performance: based on the results of a Euromoney poll of economic projections and on GNI (Atlas Method) figures per capita.
• Debt indicators: calculated using these ratios from the World Bank’s Global Development Finance 2008: (a) total debt stocks to GNP; (b) debt service to exports; and (c) current account balance to GNP. Developing countries that do not report complete debt data get a score of zero.
• Debt in default or rescheduled: scores are based on the ratio of rescheduled debt to debt stocks, taken from the World Bank’s Global Development Finance 2008.