What Guatemala needs to reach investment grade

Dossier: Macroeconomy, ratings and risk10-macro-riesgo.md
Domain: Sovereign rating and country riskmacro-riesgo
Room: Economy/economia
Audited: not audited

All three agencies place Guatemala one notch below investment grade: Moody's at Ba1, S&P at BB+ and — since the 14-Oct-2025 upgrade — Fitch at BB+. Moody's (Apr 2026) makes the step up to investment grade conditional on raising public investment from ~1.6% of GDP to 3–4% (roads, ports, airports). The World Bank ran a technical-assistance program, “Roadmap to Investment Grade”, for Guatemala, documented in a case study. Fitch lists the country among the region's BB “emerging stars” (Nov 2025).

The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.

Figures

Current public investmentPrensa Libre (cobertura de Moody's): ~1.6% of GDPApr 2026
Public investment required (Moody's)Prensa Libre (cobertura de Moody's): 3–4% of GDPApr 2026

Caveat

Moody's conditions per press coverage

Sources

Prensa Libre — Moody's mantiene Ba1 y prevé escenario optimistaprensalibre.comconsulted Aug 19, 2026
Banco Mundial — Case Study: Guatemala credit rating technical assistancethedocs.worldbank.orgconsulted Aug 19, 2026
MEF Paraguay — Regional Outlook of Sovereign Ratings dic-2025mef.gov.pyconsulted Aug 19, 2026

Organizations named in the answer

Banco MundialBenchmark series: private credit to GDP of 37.2% (2025), average lending rate of 12.85% (2025) and the Enterprise Surveys on collateral requirements (§1, §3, §4).Multilateral

Directory of organizations

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This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.