With regard to ‘sovereign debt’, it is particularly important that expected credit loss provisions made should be based on the identification and objective assessment of the nature and extent of difficulties being experienced by particular countries and reflect, as near as possible, any deterioration in the prospects for recovering debts. With these objectives in mind, the Sovereign Debt Provisioning Matrix (see Appendix CM-1) contains a list of measurements which have been designed to help identify those obligors and countries with payment difficulties and to decide what would constitute adequate provisions.