 Rolling the dice: Investors take a gamble, but must still choose wisely |
Leading the improvement is Portugal, gaining almost four points this year, and climbing nine places in Euromoney’s global risk rankings, with the economy recovering smartly.
The average global risk score for 186 countries in the survey has fallen slightly to its lowest level since Q3 2014, but generally investor risk has stabilised since the global financial turmoil in 2007/08 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2010.
The rebalancing of country risk scores reflects a ‘broad brush’ tightening of sovereign CDS spreads, and signals a very gradual shift in favour of credit rating upgrades rather than downgrades.
This year has seen improved risk scores for emerging markets (EMs) attracting $18 billion of capital inflows in June according to the Institute of International Finance, most notably in Asia.
However, debt problems and political instability have seen worsening scores for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.