SFU Library blog, BUEC Buzz, with colourful banner showing students

A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics


Political risk ratings for 140 countries: 1984-2017

Published by Mark Bodnar

line drawing of an announcer
SFU researchers now have online access to the "ICRG Researchers Dataset. Political risk points by component. Table 3B" covering the 1984-2017 period.

Granted, that name is a mouthful. Let me break it down for you: 

ICRG: International Country Risk Guide
Currently published by the PRS Group (Political Risk Service), the ICRG is "one of the world's best commercial sources of country risk analysis and ratings." (source

Table 3B: Political risk points by component
A substantial part of the PRS analysis of each country's overall risk is their assessment of the political stability of the countries covered. This table provides that data on an annual basis for approximately 140 countries, allowing for easy comparison across years or between countries.

 The political risk ratings are reported for each of the following political risk components:

A table listing components such as Government Stability, Socioeconomic Conditions, and Investment Profile, with points, to a maximum of 12.

Note that SFU researchers also have access to the overall PRS Group International Country Risk Guide, available monthly from 1989 to the present via our LexisNexis database, and annually as the Political Risk Yearbook, Country Report series via Business Source Complete.  This new ICRG Table 3B dataset extracts the key data from 1984 to 2017 and provides it in an easy-to-download-and-analyze format.  

Also note that we are hosting this dataset via our ABACUS Dataverse Network, an amazing collection of research datasets such as Inter-Corporate Ownership, Labour Force Survey, and National Input - Output Tables.  Check it out!

Finally, for more on country risk, see the Economist Intelligence Unit - Risk Briefing series via our Factiva database. (Follow the link, then click on Modify Search and add terms to focus your results.)

Questions? 

-- MarkB
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark Bodnar
Economics & Business Information Specialist
mbodnar@sfu.ca

Blog Categories
Blog Tags