Business & Finance

Tackling issues of world development without thinking about business and finance is foolhardy.  Economic development hinges on a country's or region's ability to attract companies and industries to "do business" there.  

Local entrepreneurs and business owners might be decide to open a shop or factory in one region or another based on factors like:
The size and quality of the consumer market in that region
The cost of doing business in a particular area (e.g. the cost of a telephone call)
The tax rate on profits
The level of education or vocational skills of potential employees
The basic infrastructure in a region (e.g. the quality of roads)

International investors must add to this list of criteria the following:
The risk of appropriation of their assets by the local government.
Currency risk (e.g. the risk that the local currency will depreciate relative to the foreign currency, which will reduce the company's foreign-denominated profits)

The following links point to industry resources that help foreign investors and local governments identify and promote good international investment opportunities.


Sovereign (Country) Credit Rating Actions
Moody's - actions news updated daily

Investment Promotion 
The process by which a country or region entices foreign companies and investors to invest in their country or region:

IPAnet.net: Established in 1995 as part of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA's) mandate to enhance foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing regions, the Investment Promotion Network (IPAnet) is the leading international investment-specific portal website providing free access to online foreign investment and privatization resources.

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation is a U.S. government agency that sells political risk insurance and loans to help U.S. businesses of all sizes invest and compete in more than 140 emerging markets and developing nations worldwide.


The Cost of Doing Business

The World Bank Doing Business database provides indicators of the cost of doing business by identifying specific regulations that constrain business investment, productivity, and growth.


Measuring Political Risk

The International Country Risk Guides' risk ratings have been cited by experts at the IMF, World Bank, United Nations and many other international bodies as a standard against which other ratings can be measured.

Political Risk, Economic Risk and Financial Risk
Claude B. Erb, Campbell R. Harvey (website) & Tadas E. Viskanta

ABSTRACT: How important is an understanding of country risk for investors? Given the increasingly global nature of investment portfolios, we believe it is very important. Our paper measures the economic content of five different measures of country risk: The International Country Risk Guide's political risk, the financial risk, economic risk and composite risk indices and Institutional Investor's country credit ratings. First, we explore whether any of these measures contain information about future expected stock returns by conducting trading simulations. .... We find that the country risk measures are correlated with each other, however, financial risk measures contain the most information about future equity returns. Finally, we find that country risk measures are highly correlated with country equity valuation measures. This provides some insight into the reason for higher returns for value-oriented strategies.  Link to Paper

International Business/Country Intelligence

Oxford Intelligence
Economist Intelligence Unit
World Markets Research Center
WMRC specialises in providing comprehensive and impartial business information that is vital to organisations operating in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing marketplace.