Modeling Australia's country risk: A country beta approach

The debate on the consequences and appropriate policy response to Australia's growing foreign debt has spawned a large literature. Part of this literature hypothesizes an adverse effect due to increased country risk. This paper analyzes Australia's country risk using a country beta market model in the spirit of Harvey and Zhou (1993) and Erb et al. (1996a, 1996b). Specifically, we analyze the impact of macroeconomic variables, with a special focus on open economy variables, using a regression-based approach. We find that exchange rates are the only macroeconomic factor that has impacted significantly on Australia's country beta.