Insights
What Credit Rating Agencies Actually Do
Ask most investors what a sovereign credit rating measures and the answer arrives quickly: the probability that a government repays its debt. This description captures something true, though it leaves out most of the work. It treats credit rating agencies as instruments, dials that convert fiscal data into a letter
The Rise of Information Infrastructure in Development Finance
On 10 July 2026, the African Development Bank and the Ivorian government launched the One-Stop Shop for Private Investment Reporting, known by its French acronym GUDIP (African Development Bank, 2026). The platform will centralise data on private investment that has, until now, sat scattered across sector-specific codes for
The Quiet Reinvention of Sovereign Creditworthiness: Why two unrelated publications reveal a broader shift in sovereign risk analysis.
Two publications launched this summer that, combined, reveal a broader shift on how sovereign risk analysis may be developing. Moody’s issued a sector report on sovereign debt payment pause clauses, examining new proposals from the London Coalition’s Bondholder Working Group and the Center for Global Development. This came
Who Governs Development? How successive institutions came to shape the terms on which development is financed
In 2025, debt service payments exceeded public spending on education in 113 countries across the Global South, a group encompassing some 6.1 billion people (UNESCO, 2026). In sub-Saharan Africa, governments now direct on average 3.6 times more of their public resources toward creditors than toward classrooms, a
Who Writes a Country’s Credit Story?
Every sovereign credit rating tells a story about a country’s capacity and willingness to pay. That story is co-authored. Agencies apply their methods, markets respond, and governments provide the foundations. The next step for sovereign financial governance is to build an upstream function that joins data quality, fiscal
The Natural Oligopoly: How Investors Keep the Rating Agencies in Power
Earlier this month (October), Andrew Bailey stood before the House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee and said something striking. When asked about private credit, he recalled what industry figures had told him: everything looked fine, apart from the role of the rating agencies. Then he asked, “Well, we’re