Patent ID: 6856973

Claim:
(currently amended) A method for assessing the credit worthiness of a country, said method comprising the steps of: identifying a plurality of quantitative economic indicators for the country, the plurality of economic indicators include consumer price index, labor productivity change, gross domestic product growth, short term debt to total debt, debt service ratio, foreign currency debt to exports, debt service ratio adjusted by minimum imports, foreign direct investment, current account receipts, general government balance, real interest rate, real money growth, industrial production growth, real gross domestic product growth, domestic credit creation, and export growth to import growth; determining which economic indicators are computable for the country using economic data stored in a database; assigning a desired value to each of the computable economic indicators; utilizing a computer processor to calculate economic scores for the country wherein each of the economic scores is a quantitative value relating a value of a computable economic indicator to the assigned desired value of the same computable economic indicator; storing the economic scores in the database; keeping the database current with frequent updates from publicly available sources; calculating an average of the economic scores for the country; and assigning a risk factor to the country indicating credit worthiness of the country wherein the risk factor is based on the calculated economic score average.