Second amongst eleven

The Credit Rating Agency has developed a regional rating scale for the CIS countries and has already assigned a free evaluation of 11 States. The management of the Agency expects that its services will soon be used by other issuers in the region. But experts doubt that the CIS investors will focus on the assessment of the Ukrainian Agency and will no longer require companies on the international ratings.

Credit-Rating Agency has developed a regional rating scale for the CIS countries. According to it, the new system of assigning credit ratings can allow to compare solvency of various actors (governments, local authorities, banks, insurance companies, enterprises) in the macroeconomic situation in a particular region. It is expected that the new scale would be more informative for local investors than international. Regional scale will contribute to additional turnover and strengthening ties between the countries, the agency believes.

Of the 11 CIS countries, Credit Rating agency awarded nine states the investment-grade ratings - a corridor from cisAAA to cisVVV. Top rating was awarded to Russia (cisAAA), immediately after it - Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (cisAA). Ukraine, Belarus and Armenia took the third stage - cisA. Investment levels have also been provided to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Moldova. Speculative ratings were assigned to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In all cases, outlook is stable - there are no preconditions for a rating change during the year.

The sovereign credit ratings on a regional scale of CIS was divided into two categories of levels: speculative (from cisD to cisBB) and investment (from cisBBB to cisAAA). Rating cisD denotes default, and cisAAA - the highest creditworthiness of the borrower. There are also intermediate values, which are indicated by signs plus (+) or minus (-). Each rating is forecasted to be stable, positive, negative or developing. The stable outlook indicates that currently there are no preconditions for a rating change during the year. Developing forecast indicates a high probability that the rating may change during the year. The positive outlook indicates the possibility of its increase during the year, negative - the possibility of its lowering.

While conferring rating, the rating agency analyzes the publicly available macroeconomic data over the past five years, with the forecasts and prospects of development. The dynamics of population, GDP, investment, state budget incomes and the amount of public debt, and the research results were sent to the embassies of these countries.

Sovereign credit ratings of the CIS countries on a regional scale of the Credit-Rating Agency

The Azerbaijan's economy continued to develop successfully this year. All our socio-economic indicators are at a high level. The year 2009 entered history books as the crisis year but Azerbaijan's economy grew by almost 10 percent this year.

Azerbaijan achieved accomplishments since the country's economy grew 2.8-fold in 2004-2009. The additional economic progress achieved this year once more shows that political, economic and social reforms implemented by the country bring its results.

Azerbaijan's economy grew by 5.4-fold and industrial production by 5.6 percent. Given income of population increase - rise in the amount of deposits in banks by 30 percent is the best indicator of this - it is possible to see that keeping inflation low does not have a negative impact on the people's welfare.

All Azerbaijan's macroeconomic indicators prove that the path chosen by Azerbaijan is right.
There are neither financial nor technical problems in developing investment projects. As the country's technical opportunities grow the investment projects are successfully realized. The investment programs will be certainly implemented and of course at high level.

The IT successfully develops in the country. Recently the World Economic Forum, an authoritative world organization, has awarded Azerbaijan the first place in the CIS space for development of the information-communication technology.

As far as to the social questions, the most important condition for this is economic development. Without effective economic policy it is impossible to realize any social project, any social program. Azerbaijan successfully realizes all the social programs.