Across the developing world, small businesses pay a steep and largely invisible tax on borrowed money — not because they are reckless borrowers, but because the tools used to measure their risk were never built with them in mind. Researchers from the Institute for Economics & Peace, the University of New South Wales, and the UN Development Programme have traced this overcharge to three systematic distortions in how lenders assess country risk, firm-level default, and the value of resilience — and have proposed a model that could reduce borrowing costs by more than eight percentage points witho