INVESTIR: Insights from the ICRG, July 2026

INVESTIR, July 2026.

AMERICAS:

Cuba – Implementation bottlenecks and local friction occur from the passage of 176 free-market reforms, designed to decentralize state monopolies, alongside severe fuel shortages.  Growth should be flat in ’26 and inflation hovering around 20%.

Peru – Local unrest surfaces as newly inaugurated president Keiko Fujimori executes an aggressive 1.8bn mining and fast track investment push. The country is facing almost 200 social and environmental conflicts.

WESTERN EUROPE:

Greece – Early election speculation mounts; PM is weighing options to secure a mandate before opposition forces unify. Fined by EU over agricultural fraud to the tune of 392.2mn euro. Inflation set to climb t 3.7% in ’26. Highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the EU.

Slovenia – New government pledged aggressive agenda featuring tax cuts for business/households, state deregulation, etc. Regulatory decentralization process underway, potentially complicating infrastructure projects. Fiscal expansion underway amidst sticky inflation numbers.

EASTERN EUROPE: 

Romania – Government formation difficult given the need to implement highly unpopular fiscal austerity measures; budget deficit highest in the EU (7-8% of GDP). Potential sovereign credit downgrade to junk if impasse continues into late ’26, spiking borrowing costs and imported inflation. Currency down against USD by almost 7% over past half year.

Moldova – Implosion of pro-Western cabinet following nepotism/corruption scandals at state companies. Voter disillusionment rising, threatening pro-EU’s faction’s ability to maintain stable legislative majorities in future election cycle. Currency falls just under 5% over the past year.

ASIA:

Bangladesh – Growth forecasts slashed to under 4%, given energy supply constraints, banking vulnerabilities, and weak private investment. Inflation hovering at 8.8%, driven by weak local currency and higher import costs. External debt load. Easing FX levels make $26bn repayment over the next five years steep. PV of external debt service to exports ratio breaching safety thresholds.

Myanmar – Junta’s loss of significant swaths of territory has shattered the formal economy. Grid power outages complicate matters. Hyper-inflationary environment. Debt low external debt-to-GDP levels, the country is frozen out of multilateral support levels, leaving the country dependent on bilateral creditors (China) while the parallel currency market collapses. 

MIDDLE EAST

Iran – IMF puts growth contraction at 6.1% in ’26, driven by wartime supply chokepoints and military damage to key infrastructure. Inflation set to hit close to 70%. Zero access to international capital markets. Central bank warns it could take decades to restore the economy. Private firms relying on trusted network of cross border brokers for currency transactions, and offshore shell companies are used to process payments. Crypto platforms used to dump rial for digital dollars to protect working capital.

Algeria – FXR’s falling significantly, driven by massive budget deficit and agricultural droughts. Central bank employs currency rationing measures. Private firms rely increasing on expanding (and expensive) parallel market, and currency sourcing via diaspora network, especially in southern Europe.

AFRICA

Kenya – Civil unrest and looting becoming increasingly worrisome for business. Manufacturing firms are abandoning standard delivery schedules, and move cargo exclusively during late-night ‘dead-windows.’ Larger firms paying steep premiums for political risk insurance. Growth forecast at 4.3% for ’26 and inflation to hover just over 6%. or early

Sudan – Micro-enterprises and small-to-medium factories (MSMEs) are physically packing up what machinery survived and migrating to safer regional hubs like the River Nile State or Port Sudan. Surviving economy runs on Bankak (the Bank of Khartoum’s mobile application).

Best political risk (Month-on-Month, 2025)

Armenia (2.5)

Denmark (2.5)

Germany (1.5)

Worst political risk (Month-on-Month 2025)

Senegal (-1.0)

Russia (-1.0)

Ukraine (-1.0)

Best composite risk (Year-on-Year, March 2025)

Syria (12.8)

Ghana (4.3)
Sierra Leone (3.3)

Worst composite risk (Year-on-Year, March 2025)

Cuba (-9.8)

Qatar (-9.5)

Iran (-6.3)

RISK DATA POSITIONS

Bullish

Broad commodities (precious metals/energy)

USD/TRY

CHF/EUR

Bearish

Frontier/emerging markets (Bangladesh, Kenya, Romania, etc.)

High yield corporate debt

Asian and European small cap.

WHAT’S NEW?

SCALING FOUR DECADES OF GEOPOLITICAL RISK DATA

As we mentioned in our May issue, we have been leveraging this quiet period to re-engineer our delivery models to transition our proprietary risk metrics into a fully integrated Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform. While our existing delivery modes will continue, this upgrade is designed to move toward an agile infrastructure. Over the next couple of months, PRS’ developers will be focused on building robust API architectures and fortifying historical datasets. 

Subscribers will be able to seamlessly query our deep archive of global risk metrics—spanning from the high-inflation eras of the 1980s through the 2008 financial crisis up to the current macro landscape—ensuring algorithmic models are trained on the most complete institutional risk dataset available.

This transformation fundamentally distinguishes PRS from traditional geopolitical risk groups that still rely on subjective, human-driven narrative reports. By delivering our ICRG framework via a plug-and-play API utility, we are shifting the industry standard from static PDFs to live, quantitative data engines. While competitors lack the structured depth required for algorithmic back-testing, PRS provides institutional investors with the mathematically standardized, multi-decade historical data necessary to train modern AI models and simulate portfolio resilience against global macro stress events.

THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS

This transition to automated, deep-data access comes at a time when the academic and institutional validation of our datasets has never been higher. The proprietary datasets curated by ICRG played a foundational role in the empirical research that secured the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The laureates—Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson—were recognized for their groundbreaking work proving how societal institutions heavily dictate long-term macro prosperity. In their seminal papers, the authors needed a highly precise, historic metric to quantify property rights security and institutional health, turning to the ICRG “Protection Against Expropriation Risk” index as their primary dependent variable. By plotting global economic histories against your financial risk scores, they conclusively proved that where extractive institutional structures exist, financial risk and long-term economic stagnation persist for decades.

This Nobel-winning endorsement provides an unmatched level of scientific validation that separates PRS from the rest of the geopolitical risk industry. While top competitors rely on subjective, short-term analyst opinions, PRS offers the only risk metrics in the world proven by Nobel laureates to dictate global economic reality. By using our data, institutional clients are leveraging the exact, peer-reviewed mathematical variables that define sovereign wealth, financial risk, and market stability.

Furthermore, this academic achievement highlights the competitive advantage of our deep-data fortification and DaaS transition. No other risk advisory group possesses a multi-decade, standardized database rigorous enough to back-test global economic shifts or power Nobel-prize-winning AI and econometric models. While our competitors offer localized insights that can quickly become obsolete, PRS delivers a scientifically proven, plug-and-play risk engine that gives quantitative investors a mathematical edge in predicting long-term macro trends.

NEW RESEARCHERS’ DATASETS

Clients should note that our popular Researchers’ Dataset (RDS) series – containing updates from 2025 – is available along with a range of related data series.  The RDS series – derived from our ICRG data – continues to yield unique insights in a range of topics that explore the impact of political risk on conflict and economic growth, inflation and monetary policy, youth unemployment and political stability, and much more.  Contact us at custserv@prsgroup.com to inquire about acquisition of the RDS updates.

NEW CLIENTS

June and July was a very impressive month for new and returning clients. Our newest client additions include investment entities from Indonesia and academic institutions from the UK and Asia-based think tanks. Among our returning clients are one of the world’s largest news organizations and DC-based multilaterals. By utilizing our long-term datasets, these institutions are enhancing their academic research pipelines, optimizing multi-billion-dollar cross-border portfolios, and strengthening their strategic macro forecasting engines.

ACADEMIC HAPPENINGS

As always, ICRG and related PRS data continue to be the gold standard of all geopolitical risk data among the scholarly and research communities. For example, in the 2026 book titled, Central Bank Independence and Inflation: Lessons from Latin America, Luis Jacome uses our ICRG data to analyze the impact of central bank autonomy on inflation, specifically as a robustness check in the chapter that presents the new central bank paradigm that came about following the end of WW2. The study leverages this data to confirm that central bank independence drives down inflation rates even when controlling for broader country-specific economic and political stability.

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.33941374?turn_away=true&searchText=ICRG&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DICRG%26so%3Dnew&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Ad94224786217fb5ee6039f4ba34f03fd)

DID YOU KNOW?

In a 2025 IMF Selected Issues paper using ICRG data it was found that governance deficiencies and state capture during the 2009–2018 period account for a significant share of South Africa’s total factor productivity collapse and growth stagnation since 2008. (https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/cr/2025/

CHRISTOPHER MCKEE, PHD CHIEF EXECUTIVE

Christopher McKee is PRS’ CEO and Owner. An international political economist, global investor, entrepreneur, and author, Chris received his PhD from Queen’s University (Canada) and has been involved in the field of geopolitical risk, limited recourse financing, and private sector development for the past 25 years.