Credit Rating Determinants for European Countries
The purpose of this article is to analyse factors that can affect the European countries’ credit ratings. The analysis performed is based on the level of economic development in line with the division proposed by the World Bank. The data used is derived from the World Bank database and the database of Thomson Reuters for the years 2002-2012. The full sample is divided into subsamples due to the level of economic development. Long- and short-term issuer credit ratings given by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investor Services are used as dependent variables. Ratings are decomposed linearly on numeric variables. As dependent variables I use macroeconomic data such as GDP per capita, real GDP growth, inflation, fiscal deficit, current account balance, external debt to GDP, foreign reserves.
