For this, our 27th ranking of the world's countries by creditworthiness, we have altered the scoring slightly. We have included a measure of per capita income into the score given for economic performance. This has boosted the ranking of a number of countries - especially smaller ones -which were previously penalized because little data was available on their economic performance (see methodology).

The Nordic region, with its concentration of internationally recognized corporates, prosperous retail markets and developed capital markets, is an attractive prize. The race to become the regional powerhouse is on. Euan Hagger reports.

"Clear your desk!" They're terrifying words in most offices. But if you work for ABN Amro, fear not. It's just part of the bank's "clean desk campaign".

"I know success is hard to write about, but you should congratulate the entire financial services industry - the banks, the broker dealers, the custodians, the clearing systems, the market-data providers - for their efficiency, commitment, resilience and professionalism," says Jacques Favillier, Emu project co-ordinator at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. Several weeks after the birth of the euro, there is still a note of faint disbelief in Favillier's voice that financial markets didn't suffer major disruptions during the changeover weekend. "It's been a big surprise. It's gone far better than I thought," he says.

As Brazil picks up the pieces after its currency devaluation, it needs to fight off spiralling inflation and recession. The country's ability to regain investor confidence is crucial to the whole of Latin America. Jonathan Wheatley reports

For a country crippled by bloody civil war, Sri Lanka has seen dramatic progress in privatization over the last three years. Even as bombs blew up the heart of Colombo's business district in October 1997 - an area housing the central bank, the Colombo stock exchange, the Securities Exchange Commission and the Bank of Ceylon - the country earned record revenues from privatization. The sale of the country's telecom monopoly, its second-largest development bank, half a dozen small state companies and several plantation companies, raised SLR22.5 billion ($336 million) in 1997, contributing 11.5% of total government revenue. The budget deficit for 1997 fell to 7.9% from 9.4% in the previous year, no mean achievement for a country that spends around 5% of its GDP on security.

At the age of 55, Richard Handley, former Latin American head of Citibank and architect of Argentina's foremost communications and media empire, has decided to get out while he is ahead. Although he continues as a director of CEI Citicorp Holdings, the company he created, he stepped down as CEO in September "to spend more time with my wife and on the farm. I'm playing a bit more golf too".

Behind the thriving anarchy of China's coastline there's an industrial hinterland that is depressed, debt-ridden and still largely state-controlled. Few bosses of the state-owned enterprises there have the power to cut their workforce or pay bonuses. Even if they do, the state-owned banks are keeping them and the competition on life-support. Overcapacity, pollution and poverty are omnipresent, part-mitigated by the huge Three Gorges Dam project, which employs 25,000 people and will displace two million. Euromoney's Steven Irvine followed investment scout Richard Tsiang into the interior to see China's true economic heartland - a textile company that raise pigs, a salt plant with its eyes on a broadcast-equipment producer and a television factory that wants to give away its products