These studies are the natural follow-on of the work begun in the early nineties to establish statistical methods for measuring the fragility of non-financial companies on the basis of balance-sheet data; further improvements have been made recently by combining the estimates with indicators of difficulties in serving loans taken from the Central Credit Register and extending the analysis to a sample of rnore than 400,000 companies.
BIS Review 55/2004  maturing of these indicators can be expected and where per capita income levels are still relatively low compared to East Asia and (iii) China and the Indian subcontinent, where the ageing process is occurring somewhat later and which is far less economically developed.