The Emerging Markets Investor’s Guide to Country Risk by Richard Marney, Philipp Waeber

Systematic risks often pose greater threats to investment performance than idiosyncratic factors, particularly in emerging markets where macroeconomic volatility, political instability, and institutional weakness can reshape outcomes. Yet many risk assessments remain anchored in static snapshots of economic indicators, market metrics, political developments, and event risk, often offering limited guidance when structural change is underway. This book addresses that gap by first providing a detailed analysis of EMDEs’ current macroeconomic fundamentals and how ongoing structural shifts such as geopolitical realignment, climate pressures, and technological disruption change them, and second through introducing the Investor’s Rutter, a practical framework for interpreting how economic, political, institutional, and financial forces interact and evolve over time. Rather than emphasizing prediction, the Investor’s Rutter offers a disciplined approach to interpreting change and uncertainty.

Drawing on primary case studies and counterfactuals, the authors show how this framework can help investors make more informed judgments about the pricing of risk, exposure, resilience, and investment strategy across the full investment life cycle. It helps distinguish temporary volatility from deeper structural shifts, identify emerging inflection points, and assess when prevailing assumptions may no longer hold. By integrating perspectives often treated separately in conventional country risk analysis, the book offers a distinctive framework for investors navigating a period in which traditional models face growing limitations.

Richard Marney is a senior advisor for risk management at responsAbility Investments AG, where he previously served as the firm’s Chief Risk Officer. Over a 50-year career, Richard has held senior-level business development, riskmanagement, fundraising, and operating roles in: (i) commercial and investment banking, (ii) micro-finance, (iii) impact investment asset management, and (iv) private equity working in globally recognized financial services organizations, including BNY-Mellon and JP Morgan. Additionally, Richard has extensive experience on company boards of directors, and investment and advisory committees across a broad range of sectors and regions, and has lectured in international and development economics at the graduate university level. Along with Timothy Stubbs, he has published Corporate Debt Restructuring in Emerging Markets: A Practical Post-Pandemic Guide (2021) and Debt Restructuring in Emerging Markets: Effectively Navigating Local Institutional Frameworks (2024) through Palgrave Macmillan. Philipp Waeber is the Chief Economist at responsAbility Investments AG, a leading impact asset manager specializing in private markets across diverse emerging economies. He advises the firm’s credit business on investment decisions and structuring to price and mitigate country risks. In close to two decades of experience as an economist, he has developed a profound understanding of what triggers crises, how they unfold, and where they leave corporates within a country.