Capital Flight as a Political Risk Indicator

Michel-Henry Bouchet

Country risk is no longer what it used to be. It stems increasingly from all the adverse business consequences of the uncertainty surrounding a country’s economic, financial and socio-political situation, not from excessive sovereign debts. As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) summarised it in the midst of the global financial crisis: “Sovereign risks have been transformed in a number of important ways as a direct consequence of the crisis and major fault lines in the financial sector. As the public sector intervened to support financial institutions, distinctions between sovereign and non-sovereign and private liabilities have been blurred, and public exposure to private risks has increased.”11IMF, 2011, “Definition and Measurement of Sovereign Risk Need to be Broadened”, Roundtable, Press Release No. 11/91, Washington, D.C., March 18.

THE END OF INNOCENCE

The traditional divide between developed/emerging countries is obsolete at best, and a source of errors in country risk assessment at worst. This divide adds a conceptual myopia to the complexity of economic, financial and socio-political risk assessment. Emerging market countries with large external debt and little

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