How Does the ICRG Geopolitical Risk Data Affect the Work of Multilateral Agencies?

A range of multilateral agencies, including the IMF, have used our International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) for decades.  The long-running series informs country reports as well as countless Working Papers that have been published over the years.

Every once in a while we receive some very pleasant and instructive comments about our data in the text of these reports.

For example:

‘Employing this dataset allow us to control for variables that are otherwise hardly available at the quarterly level, including corruption, internal conflict, law and order, and bureaucracy quality.’

M Montes de Oca Leon, A Hagen, F Holz
‘The Political Economy of Fossil Fuel Subsidy Removal: Evidence from Bolivia and Mexico,’ IMF Working Paper, 2024/230 Nov 2024.

And….

‘…[F]iscal frameworks do not exert independent effects when the quality of institutions (proxied by measures of social, institutional, economic, and financial vulnerability reported by the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG)) is accounted for.’

Kenya, Selected Issues
IMF Country Report No. 25/29 (2025)

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