Editorial Review of
Institutional Investor and Euromoney Country Risk Ratings

The long-running country risk ratings published by these two magazines -- owned by the same company -- are used by many banks, mutual funds, and the like, as authoritative measures of country risk. Both ratings use essentially the same approach: poll the experts, in this case the economics departments of financial institutions around the globe. There's no better measure of the "consensus opinion" of the world's bankers on country risk levels worldwide.

Institutional Investor publishes a rating specifically for "country credit" (essentially, sovereign risk). Euromoney has a broader rating of funds transfer risks more generally, and the rating's broken down into components including political risk, economic risk and some purely quantitative measures (e.g., the discount on forfaiting).

http://www.institutionalinvestor.com and http://www.euromoney.com