As of June 30, 2021, S&P Global Ratings rates 136 sovereign governments and has transfer and convertibility (T&C) assessments for each country with a rated sovereign.

Rating Trends

From June 1, to June 30, 2021, S&P Global Ratings took the following rating actions:

• Suriname: Local currency long- and short-term ratings lowered to 'SD/--/SD' from 'CC/Negative/C'. Foreign currency long- and short-term ratings affirmed at 'SD/--/SD'.

Outlook revisions/CreditWatch actions:

• Australia: Outlook on the 'AAA' foreign and local currency long-term ratings revised to stable from negative.
• Papua New Guinea: Outlook on the 'B-' foreign and local currency long-term ratings revised to negative from CreditWatch negative.
• Uzbekistan: Outlook on the 'BB-' foreign and local currency long-term ratings revised to stable from negative.

Chart 1

Distribution Of Ratings And Changes In 2021 As Of June 30

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Rating/Assessment Histories

The rating and assessment histories are shown in table 4, with the top line for each sovereign showing the ratings and assessment as of June 30, 2021. The rating history for the U.S. dates back to as early as Jan. 1, 1941. For most, they start on the day S&P Global Ratings first assigned a rating. For information on our sovereign rating criteria, please see "Sovereign Rating Methodology," published on Jan. 22, 2019, on RatingsDirect.

The right-most column below in table 4 contains T&C assessments. The history begins in November 2005, at which time S&P Global Ratings expanded its criteria for analyzing T&C risk. A T&C assessment is the rating associated with the likelihood of the sovereign restricting access to foreign exchange needed for debt service. For most countries, S&P Global Ratings' analysis concludes that this risk is less than the risk of sovereign default on foreign currency obligations; thus, most T&C assessments exceed the sovereign foreign currency rating. Foreign currency ratings of nonsovereign entities or transactions generally can be as high as the T&C assessment if their stress-tested operating and financial characteristics support the higher rating.

If a sovereign, through membership in a monetary or currency union, has ceded monetary and exchange rate policy responsibility to a monetary authority that the sovereign does not solely control, the T&C assessment reflects the policies of the controlling monetary authority, vis-à-vis the exchange of its currency for other currencies in the context of debt service. The same applies if a sovereign uses as its local currency the currency of another sovereign. A T&C assessment may change sharply if a sovereign introduces a new local currency, by entering or exiting a monetary or currency union, or through some other means. This is because the new local currency, and in some cases the new monetary authority, may operate in very different monetary and exchange regimes. The T&C assessment does not normally reflect the likelihood of change in a country's local currency.

Table 4