Editorial Review of
Political Risk Services
[Category: Global/Comprehensive Country Risk]
Political Risk Services is the long-running brainchild of two academics who devised a unique methodology for combining expert forecasts of highly uncertain phenomena. For unknown reasons, they then decided to apply this methodology to political risk, instead of something lucrative like, say, betting on horses. PRS runs with a skeleton head-office staff who combine the results of surveys of large numbers of country experts (academics, journalists) to produce country risk reports and ratings.
PRS has been around for a long time, and has a large presence among the Fortune 500. Its reports are cheap, and competently address political risk for direct investors as well as a touch of economics.
Updated April 9, 2004Not a huge fan. I have a hard time buying their probabilities (e.g. Liklihood of Chinese government staying in power over next 5 years 75%). Where do they come up with these numbers? Also, I've never found their prose too helpful. It's boring to read and never gives any ground-breaking insights. Someone showed me an expose on PRS written by a former employee. It was published in a left-wing journal called The Baffler. The expose was all about how PRS has one analyst covering some absurd number of countries. It shows. Their stuff just isn't very deep and that makes their numbers hard to believe.
Posted by: Lionel Demarco on July 26, 2004All user reviews posted to Countryrisk.com reflect the personal opinion of the authors and not necessarily the opinion of their company/organization or of Countryrisk.com.
I disagree with the previous reviewer. We've found the Political Risk Services reports to be more comprehensive than most others, and they recognize that politics aie unpredictable, something most others don't seem to get. Most political risk reports insist on making truly implausible forecasts. Politral risk services provides scenarios, so you can think about all the possible outcomes and plan accordingly.
Posted by: Alan Tate on August 30, 2004All user reviews posted to Countryrisk.com reflect the personal opinion of the authors and not necessarily the opinion of their company/organization or of Countryrisk.com.
The Baffler article referenced by Lionel Demoarco was written by a disgruntled former PRS employee who gathered background research for biographies and timelines for Political Risk Services' Country Reports, but had no involvement whatsoever with risk forecasting. He decided to critique his former boss, as had already done very extensively, and even more ridiculously, to another former employer in the Syracuse area.
Posted by: Mary Lou Walsh, The PRS Group, Inc. on October 13, 2004All user reviews posted to Countryrisk.com reflect the personal opinion of the authors and not necessarily the opinion of their company/organization or of Countryrisk.com.