Methodologies used by global credit rating agencies need to be more transparent: CEA's co-authored article

22 Dec 2023 Evaluate

An article written by Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran and Senior Adviser Rajiv Mishra said that the methodologies used by global credit rating agencies are heavily loaded against developing nations and there is a pressing need to reform the rating process to make them more transparent. It said the rating of India remained static at 'BBB-' during the last 15 years, despite it climbing the ladder from being the 12th largest economy in the world in 2008 to the 5th largest in 2023, with the second highest growth rate recorded during the period among all the comparator economies. 

Thereby, the article said any improvement in macro-economic parameters may virtually mean nothing for a credit rating if qualitative parameters are judged to be in need of improvement. This has serious implications for developing sovereigns' access to capital markets and ability to borrow at affordable rates. It said over-reliance on non-transparent qualitative factors, including perceptions, value judgements, views of a limited number of experts, and surveys with loose methodologies in sovereign rating, results in unacceptable outcomes from a global point of view. It makes the rating of developing countries almost invariant with respect to even sizeable movements in relevant macroeconomic fundamentals. This happens because the base rating, estimated through quantitative scoring of macro-fundamentals, is overridden by qualitative considerations while finalising the published ratings.

Further, it said the set of loose qualitative information fed into the quantitative scoring of countries and the final qualitative overlay, based purely on the agency's subjective assessment of the countries' ability and willingness to pay, become heavily loaded against the developing countries. It also said given that private capital has a larger role to play in addressing global challenges over the coming decades, even a small reduction in the cost of borrowing for developing countries would go a long way. It noted that reforming the sovereign rating methodology to more accurately reflect a developing nation's default risk has the potential to save billions of dollars for borrowing countries. Thus, it said bringing about positive transformations in the rating process through greater accuracy and transparency has never been more crucial than it is now. 


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