ABSTRACT
Technological developments in the field of transport and communication have meant that distances between countries are losing their significance. For European entrepreneurs it has therefore become increasingly easy to sell and produce goods and services outside their own region. Country selection can be compared to a filtering process: the entrepreneur filters the most attractive sales market out of a large number of countries using a set of predetermined criteria. European entrepreneurs in Argentina, Brazil, Russia and some countries in Southeast Asia were confronted by country risk around the turn of the millennium. An exporter encounters a number of risks in other countries that do not apply to domestic transactions. The risk that a currency shortage might develop in a particular country increases in proportion to how low its international reserves become. In a country risk analysis, the foreign debt and the debt service obligations are usually linked to exports.
