For the first time the agency included environmental, social and governance (ESG) aspects in its methodology. In its report, DBRS Morningstar recognised the country's strong commitment to reducing greenhouse gases and high level of productivity, respect for human rights and widespread access to quality healthcare and its good transparent governance.

The latter may come as a surprise following the OpenLux revelations. This data scrape from Luxembourg’s beneficial owners register, found that among the beneficiaries of Luxembourg-domiciled firms were billionaires, singers, actors and sports stars with no obvious connection to the country.

While the incident showed that Luxembourg is making taking steps to make data more open, more needs to be done to check the data is accurate and to expose potential financial criminals among beneficial owners.  

Luxembourg finance minister Pierre Gramegna (DP) responded to the DBRS Monrningstar rating, saying: “An ambitious environmental policy, a high-performance and high-quality social system and a governance framework that stands out for its transparency are indeed at the heart of Luxembourg's success.”

Last week, Gramegna strongly defended the beneficial owners register, saying that Luxembourg was being criticised for going beyond what other countries had done--most other countries make such a service fee-paying or people wishing to view the data have to register and cannot view it anonymously.

Also in its report, DBRS Moringstar wrote that Luxembourg had the necessary capacity to absorb the shock of the pandemic and recover, despite the budgetary impact of business support measures and the contraction of the economy in 2020. It estimates that the public debt ratio should remain below 30% of GDP.