Thursday, August 18, 2011

Nepal’s sovereign rating

Nepal does not have a sovereign rating. Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch, the three international rating agencies, have not rated Nepal. Altogether 58 developing countries are still not rated by them. Canuto, Mohapatra and Ratha of the World Bank followed the same methodology used by S&P to estimate the rating of the unrated developing countries.

As of April 2011, Nepal got CCC+, Maldives B+ to BB+, Bhutan and Bangladesh BB- to BB. Nepal falls under the "high default risk" category; Maldives “highly speculative”; and Bhutan “speculative”. The rating is based on a regression outcome with the independent variables GNI per capita, GDP growth rate, debt to exports ratio, reserves to imports to short term debt, growth volatility, inflation and rule of law.