According to Aswath Damodaran's "Country Risk Map," Italy, although still being inside a risk barrier for investors (on a scale of 0-25%), with a 3.3% "risk coefficient," is distant from the main European economies and the G7 nations. Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, classified all of the world's economies into three risk categories: "Political Risk" (type of regime, level of stability, and government corruption), "Legal Risk" (protection and application of property and contractual rights), and "Economic Structure" (level of diversification of the economy). To these is added the "Default Risk" (the amount and capacity to repay public debt), and the total of these coefficients yields the "Country Risk," i.e. the investment risk coefficient per nation. At the top of the world ranking are countries such as the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia, and Denmark, which can boast a risk of 0.0% (as a result of indicators such as AAA-rated government bonds, low corruption, and strong property rights protection), followed by the economies of Austria (0.6%), France (0.8%), the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Belgium (0.9%), just above Japan (1.1%) and Spain (2.4%). To locate Italy, one must descend the ranking to the very bottom and proceed beyond the 3.3% risk coefficient. At this point, economies including Mauritius, Montserrat (Lesser Antilles), Romania, and India converge alongside Italy. Botswana (1.8%), Bulgaria (2.4%), and Mexico (2.9%) all do better. Italy pays for a complicated and extremely "interpretable" legal framework, a judicial system that remains one of the slowest in Europe, and a bureaucracy and national and regional economic policies that are altered with each change of administration.
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