Managing Country Risk

Chapter 4

Country Risk Assessment in Practice

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Albert Einstein¹

Creating a Risk Management Framework

One of the challenges corporate management and country risk analysts face in crafting a methodology that will gain wide acceptance in an organization is a tendency for existing risk management practices and biases to inhibit development of a tool that does not reproduce the defects inherent in the system. Among the most common impediments are:

• A breakdown in communication between analysts, risk management, and senior management

• Unresolved conflicts between staff and management

• A tendency to overlook or ignore defects or problems

• Killing the messenger ...