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by David Roche

The Philippine government is recruiting the private sector to develop and upgrade the country's infrastructure. But how will the private sector raise the financing it needs on the international capital markets? By Maggie Ford

All over Europe, banks are counting the cost of preparing for the single currency ­whether their home country is "in" or "out". Apart from buying new bank-wide technology, they face a loss of trading revenue and a threat to their corporate client base. Not to mention the thought that it may never happen. Peter Lee reports

The concept of shareholder value is transforming the way Hungarian companies communicate with investors ­ at least it is for the 50 or so companies traded on the Budapest Stock Exchange. By Henry Copeland

Bernard Connolly, whose critical book The Rotten Heart of Europe lost him his job at the European Commission, continues to write unwelcome truths about the Maastricht Treaty and "Euroland" after January 1999. Here, he looks at the future of no-longer-sovereign government bond markets. Good news for Italy, bad news for Belgium.

Peter Lee and Steven Irvine

The next cycle of sovereign debt default will be different from the last. Lawyers hope that the mechanisms for coping with it will have evolved as well. By Christopher Stoakes

Brazil's finances are being taken in hand. But fiscal reform depends on constitutional changes, and so far president Cardoso hasn't fulfilled any of his promises. The team implementing the Real Plan for recovery believes some measures can be taken without a battle in congress, but these ideas are still on paper. Although inflation is down, external investment is up and privatization has sped up, the markets will give Brazil only so long. Danielle Robinson reports

Edited by Steven Irvine

Competition in French banking is distorted by an outdated legal framework. French banks need to be downsized and made more profitable. Their returns on equity and cost/income ratios are deplorable. Strong statements. But those aren't Euromoney's views, they're the views of Marc Viénot, chairman of one of France's biggest banks, Société Générale. He spoke to Felix Salmon

The Euromoney country risk assessment uses nine categories that fall into three broad groups: analytical indicators, credit indicators and market indicators. The weighted scores are calculated as follows: the highest score in each category receives the full mark for the weighting; the lowest receives zero. In between, figures are calculated according to the formula: Final score = weighting/(maximum score minimumscore) x (score minimum score). The country risk ranking shows only the final scores after weighting.

Despite measures by some governments to curb expenditure, withdeflationary effects on economic growth, the health of Arab banks remains good.Banks from the Gulf Cooperation Council states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, continue to dominate the top 100 rankings. Martin Gallagher and Andrew Ioannou analyze the latest results.