Abstract

The empirically relationship between Saudi Arabia’s country risk ratings; political, economic, and financial components and its stock market movements is examine from both short and long-run perspectives in this paper. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) methodology is the main instrument of investigation to explore their interdependencies. We find that the country credit risk ratings have a close association with the Saudi Arabia stock market movements. The financial risk factor displays the highest level of sensitivity among all the credit risk ratings. It is sensitive to both economic risk rating and the stock market returns. This development implies that financial risk indicators such as foreign debt servicing, current account balance and exchange rate stability among others should be considered before any strategic investment decision in the country. There is reduced or insignificant political risk sensitivity to other variables. This shows that political risk rating issues are relatively the least considered in Saudi Arabia as shown in this study.

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