The Impact of War and Pandemic Crises on the Sovereign Creditworthiness and Solvency. The Position, Role and Decisions of International Rating Agencies

Abstract

Theoretical background: The sovereign creditworthiness and solvency in the context of the pandemic and war crises is one of the biggest challenges that the modern world and the financial market face. It has a key impact on the basic economic indicators, including the price of debt incurred by individual countries and, thus, the profitability of debt securities. The COVID-19 pandemic, which began at the turn of 2019 and 2020, and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine which started on 24 February 2022, have strongly impacted the level of debt of European states and other countries of the world. The energy crisis, which is currently growing, is also taking its toll on the main economic indicators. International credit rating agencies are institutions that have been analysing the sovereign creditworthiness and solvency and individual business entities for many decades. At times, their activities have been the subject of criticism, but their place in the global financial market seems unthreatened and the results of their work still constitute the basic indicator of creditworthiness and solvency evaluation.

Purpose of the article: The purpose of this article is to present issues related to the impact of war and pandemic crises on the sovereign creditworthiness and solvency and also the position, role and decisions of international rating agencies. Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, these are very important issues that have a real impact on the economic condition of individual countries as well as the standard of living of citizens. This article focuses on these elements of the contemporary reality.

Research methods: The subject matter and purpose of the article have been illustrated against the background of current theoretical knowledge, historical research and the latest analyses of key economic indicators, such as inflation or bond yields. The study of the impact of wars on sovereign ratings was empirical. To visualise the historical scale of the wars and pandemics destruction, in the analytical part of the study, statistical data has been re-scaled to the current global population.

Main findings: The research conducted in this article has indicated that crises related to a pandemic and war have a negative impact on the sovereign creditworthiness and solvency. Historical studies of armed conflicts and pandemics have shown that the former had a significantly greater impact on inflation and bond yields. For example, the level of inflation started to drop within one year after the end of the wars and almost immediately after the end of the pandemic. The same applied to bond yields. Of course, this was directly reflected in the evaluations of international rating agencies. The issues discussed in the article are of practical application, because the on-going war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic have had a very large impact on the global economy and the financial condition of individual countries. Our research also shows that the war hit the ratings of sovereign countries directly involved in the war, while other countries’ ratings (possibly threatened by aggression from Russia in the future – e.g. EU countries) remain stable.