105th in credit rating

Lebanon’s credit rating falls by 3.2 points since last September: Institutional Investor

Lebanon’s credit rating dropped by 3.2 points on a semi-annual basis to 32.5 as at March 2012, according to the Institutional Investor’s Country Credit Survey report published on March 13. The previous survey was published in September 2011.

The report, titled Europe’s Woes Weigh on World, assesses the creditworthiness and credit riskiness of 179 countries and assigns a credit rating to each. Countries are rated on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the best rating.

Lebanon was positioned 105th worldwide in terms of credit rating. It was ranked14th regionally, out of 19 Middle Eastern countries. In the survey published last September, Lebanon’s international rank was 99th (among 176 countries) and its regional rank was 13th (among 19 countries).

The report said that around 67 percent of surveyed economists “expected a change in Lebanon’s political regime during the upcoming years”.

The report said that most of the Middle Eastern countries enjoying a credit rating improvement are oil producers. These include Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Oman. It said that countries which had a rating downgrade are located at the center of Arab revolutions. Alongside Lebanon, these include Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Tunisia, and Morocco.

On a global level, the report highlighted the repercussions on the world economy of the Euro zone’s long running debt crisis. It said that 108 countries saw their credit rating cut by more than one point. Only 22 economies received a rating upgrade. The world average credit rating was, according to the report, 44.1 points.


by Hanadi Chami