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CUSTOMIZED, SYSTEMATIC COUNTRY RISK ASSESSMENT IS CRITICAL FOR COMPANIES THAT CONTEMPLATE ACTIVITY ABROAD.
Country risk analysis (CRA) attempts to identify imbalances that increase the risk of a shortfall in the expected return Of a cross-border investment. This paper describes the general process used to create risk measures and discusses some of the weaknesses of this process. It then examines the degree of association of six measures and analyzes the ability of these measures to predict returns for a manufacturing investment. The paper concludes that company analysts may improve the performance of risk measures available from commercial services by adjusting risk measurement to fit the company's specific type of foreign direct investment.
Introduction
All business transactions involve some degree of risk. When business transactions occur across international borders, they carry additional risks not present in domestic transactions. These additional risks, called country risks, typically include risks arising from a variety of national differences in economic structures, policies, socio-political institutions, geography, and currencies. Country risk analysis (CRA) attempts to identify the potential for these risks to decrease the expected return of a cross-border investment.
"Risk" implies that an analyst can identify a welldefined event drawn from a large sample of observations. A large sample contains enough observations to develop a statistical function amenable to probability analysis. An event that lacks these requirements moves toward uncertainty on the continuum between pure risk and pure uncertainty. For example, the probability of death from an auto accident classifies as a risk; the probability of death from a nuclear meltdown falls into uncertainty, given a lack of nuclear meltdown observations. Many of the individual events investigated by country risk analysis fall closer to uncertainties than well-defined statistical risks. This forces analysts to construct risk measures from theoretical or judgmental, rather than probabilistic, foundations.
Uncertainty makes CRA more similar to a soft art than a hard science. Analysts deal with the soft nature of CRA in different ways, which can result in widely varying views of the risk level of a country. For this reason, users of risk measures developed from commercial country-risk services must understand analysts' construction methods if they wish to analyze a company investment risk appropriately. As demonstrated in the sections below, company analysts should be able to...