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The complete edition brings the whole Economic Recovery Road Map series into a single volume: the general report, four sub-regional compendia (Levant and Mesopotamia, Arabian Peninsula, Horn of Africa and Red Sea, North Africa) and sixteen country papers covering every Arab sovereign rated below investment grade or unrated. Each country is read through five pillars — quality of government; size, wealth and diversification; fiscal capacity; the internal balance sheet and external position; and social resilience — and placed on a three-category scale with a tier beyond it for sovereigns whose indicators no longer describe capacity.
The volume is built to be read at two levels. Within each country, the paper shows how each pillar constrains or carries the sovereign, scores twenty-one constructs, applies the overriding caps, and closes with reform steps, benchmarks, the resources the state can still mobilise and the entry conditions for its next category. Between countries, the compendia and the general report rank all sixteen on a single 0–100 composite, compare sub-regional averages and explain why sovereigns with similar balance sheets land in different categories.
For investors, lenders, development partners and policymakers, the value lies in consistency: one framework, one set of scoring bands and one ranking applied from Morocco at the investment-grade frontier to Sudan in civil war and famine, with each road map sequenced over a three-to-five-year horizon.
Key findings
- Composites range from 73.2 for Morocco to 6.4 for Sudan, with Morocco and Jordan the only Category 1 sovereigns and Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Sudan off the scale.
- North Africa averages about twenty points above every other sub-region and leads on all five pillars, while the Levant and the Peninsula are each split between one of the series' strongest and one of its weakest sovereigns.
- The overriding caps change the final grade of seven of the sixteen countries and never raise one.
- Every country paper names a binding constraint and a decisive action, from a ring-fenced fiscal rule in Morocco to a single restructuring perimeter with depositor priority in Lebanon.
- Youth unemployment exceeds 30% in at least ten of the sixteen countries, making employment the shared failure across all categories.
Summary of the paper; the full analysis is in the PDF.