Different Measures of Country Risk: An Application to European Countries

Abstract

Country Risk (CR) is a relevant instrument to analyze and understand economic performances and relationships between different countries in the actual economic and political international globalized context. The present work develops indexes for the European Union countries by applying three different methods in the field of formative approach. Our aim is to show how robust CR measurements can be developed by operational and easily computable methods. We identify a set of significant variables included in the reference literature. Then, we propose three simple aggregative processes in order to obtain CR measures, at a precise time and over time. As a result, if we compare the outcomes, similar CR rankings emerge. In other words, there are no relevant differences in results also due to different methods of applications. The findings demonstrate that the choice of the aggregation method depends on the willingness of the researcher to baste the analysis with or without weighing and, therefore, on the semantic content that is assigned to the entire research structure. Each analysis should follow a disinterested theoretical–methodological consistency, knowing that the choice of a particular indexing process in the field of aggregation does not significantly alter the nature of the results compared to what would result by applying a different method.