The sovereign ceiling has long functioned as a broad proxy for government interference risk in project and issuer-level credit assessment. Our recent CCSI paper examines whether that logic still holds for modern financing structures, and proposes a four-step framework that disaggregates sovereign risk into identifiable transmission channels and assesses each against the mitigants in place.
The argument is methodological. Sovereign ceilings should not function as an automatic constraint inferred from sovereign characteristics alone when the actual channels of interference and their mitigants can be assessed directly at the instrument and issuer level. The paper focuses on domestic-revenue infrastructure in EMDEs, where ceilings often have the most distortionary effects, and grounds the framework in empirical evidence from the GEMs database and real transactions across power, digital infrastructure, and other capital-intensive sectors.
Speakers: Igor Zelezetskii, Senior Fellow, CCSI; Former CEO ACRA (Credit Rating Agency); Former VP, Moody’s
Arend Kulenkampff, Innovative Finance Lead for Nature Lab, Nature Finance
Waide Warner, Harvard Law School
Robert Ginsburg, Hult International Business School
Moderated by:
Perrine Toledano, Director of Research and Policy, CCSI
Ana Maria Camelo Vega, Senior Economics and Finance Researcher, CCSI
Event Overview: This 90-minute session will combine a presentation of the paper’s key findings with reflections from senior practitioners on insurance and backtesting, investment and financing structures, regional and institutional considerations, and the path ahead, followed by an open audience discussion.
Applied Perspectives Panel With invited senior practitioners from across multilateral development banks, development finance institutions, rating agencies, insurance, and structured finance.
