9/9/2014: Russia's Risks are Up, but Still Vastly Outperforming Ukraine's

Earlier today I tweeted about the drop in the drop in the credit risk score for Russia in the Euromoney Country Risk survey. As always, one has to look at the scores in both time series context and comparative to the peer economies.

Here is the Russian score in time series context:

It is worth noting that Russian score has declines rather steadily over time, but remains well ahead the regional average for the Eastern and Central Europe. Part of Russian score decline is driven by the ECE trend, but part is idiosyncratic.

Here are the main components of the score and the direction:

The sea of read arrows is what is of greater concern - scores dropping across all categories surveyed except one: debt indicators.

For comparative, the chart below shows evolution of Ukraine score, which is much less benign than that of Russia and remains deep under-performer in the Eastern and Central Europe:

Table below (click to enlarge) shows cross-countries comparatives for score and main components for Russia's main non-EU neighbours:

At the bottom of the above table, I list countries that are in 'credit risk' proximity to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. One thing is clear: Russia is comparing favourably to Eastern European countries that are EU members. Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova - do not. Their proximates are least-developed countries of the region.