RIESGO PAÍS Y RIESGO SOBERANO: CONCEPTO Y MEDICIÓN

Abstract

Nowadays there is a growing interest for country risk and sovereign ¡isk as indicators for monitoring global investors' perception of risk. These indicators a¡e also used by local and international entrepreneurs in order to assess the risk exposure of their real investments in emerging markets. Although, country and sovereign risks are closely related, they are not the same. In this work one offers a definition for each one of them and discusses different indicators that are aimed to separately measure country risk and sovereign risk. One states that country risk is associated with the volatility of unanticipated changes in the levels of public and private (domestic and international) investments that are financed either with debt or equity. Given this definition, the sovereign risk is a subset of the country risk because it is associated only to the volatility of the unanticipated changes in the levels of public investment. Concerning the measurement of country risk and sovereign risk, one concludes that the analysed indicators do not fit to the proposed definitions. Hence, their usefulness will vary depending on strength of each indicator.