Published: October 15, 2019
Jordan starts with a stable credit rating from Fitch with the backdrop of a rather nuanced picture
The rating agency has set Jordan’s rating at BB- with stable outlook, reflecting a strong reform agenda offset by high levels of public debt.
On 13 June, Fitch Ratings assigned Jordan a credit rating of BB- with a stable outlook. This rating, Fitch’s first rating for Jordan, is comparable to the B+/B with stable outlook assigned by Standard & Poor’s last year.
As Toby Iles, director of Middle Eastern and African Sovereign Ratings at Fitch, explained in a webinar, the picture for Jordan is rather nuanced. The country’s noted strengths, including in part macroeconomic stability and a good reform agenda, are counterbalanced by a number of constraining factors.
“In Jordan, we have a country with large external financing needs,” said Iles. “And we also have a country where there’s resilient availability of domestic and external financing, and a government that has shown some track record of reforms and maintains mid-to-low growth.”