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Model methodsSovereign riskactive

Sovereign stress

A logistic score for a sovereign credit event within three years, using lagged public fiscal, external, monetary, and growth features.

Registry slug:
sovereign-stress
Visible surface:
/sovereign/stress

Data and implementation

Vintage

10,452 country-year scores for 237 economies from 1980 through 2024, with 17 stored coefficients, measured 2026-08-30

Data tables

  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_eval.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_coefficients.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_univariate.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_experiment.parquet

Engine

  • engine/finweave_engine/layers/sovereign_stress.py

Producer

scripts/build/build_sovereign_stress.py

Outputs

  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_eval.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_coefficients.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_univariate.parquet
  • data/parquet/sovereign_stress_experiment.parquet

Source: Global Macro Database, release 2026_06; World Bank, total reserves including gold (FI.RES.TOTL.CD); Bank of Canada and Bank of England, Sovereign Default Database, 2025 edition; OECD, Country Risk Classifications of the Participants to the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits

Method

The target is a sovereign default or distressed restructuring beginning in the model year or following two years. Fiscal, external, monetary, and growth features are observed with a lag; each economic term is winsorized on its training fold, median-imputed, standardized, and paired with a missing-indicator term.

The 17-term coefficient artifact contains the intercept, eight standardized economic-feature weights, and eight missing-indicator weights. A missing-indicator term activates when the underlying observation is absent, so the score can move because a country did not report a figure. Those terms remain visible on /sovereign/methodology through stressCoefficients(); no coefficient values are copied into this registry.

The score surface is /sovereign/stress, while /sovereign/methodology publishes the live coefficient groups. Both pages read the model artifacts rather than registry-copied weights.

Methodology evidence

Path and linesEvidence
engine/finweave_engine/layers/sovereign_stress.py:240-285fit_logistic() fits the design columns, and predict() maps the intercept plus economic and missing-indicator terms to a score.
scripts/build/build_sovereign_stress.py:255-299Writes the score, evaluation, coefficient, univariate, and natural-experiment outputs.
docs/sovereign_methodology.md:71-79Documents the live coefficient surface and the interpretation of economic and missingness terms.
src/components/sovereignStress/data.ts:95-102Queries the stored coefficient parquet for the live sovereign-methodology table.

Equations

Linear predictorz = X @ beta + intercept
Sovereign stress scorescore = 1 / (1 + exp(-z))

Validation

  • The main output contains 10,452 observations for 237 economies from 1980 through 2024, and the coefficient output contains 17 rows.
  • The producer publishes blocked walk-forward, natural-experiment, alternative-threshold, at-risk, and OECD-comparison results rather than selecting only favorable tests.
  • The debt/GDP-only benchmark is stronger in every stored debt-ratio comparison. On the separate OECD Country Risk Classification subset, the model's small edge is treated as effectively a tie rather than a broad win.

Limitations

  • The training crisis labels end in 2017, and 2020s defaults are absent from training. The natural experiment tests that limitation but does not repair it.
  • The CRAG event rule misses small defaults relative to GDP, including Ethiopia's 2023 Eurobond default, and should not be special-cased after the fact.
  • Missingness is predictive in this fitted model. Users must distinguish a missing-indicator contribution from a deterioration in a reported economic value.
  • This is a conditional public-data model score, not a credit rating, market price, or event forecast for a named country.

References

Metadata endpoint

PathMethodReturnsExample
/api/methods/[slug]GETRegistry metadata, implementation paths, measured vintage, methodology evidence, validation, and limitations. No model observations or parquet contents./api/methods/sovereign-stress
Last verified 2026-08-30