The history of debt relief goes back several decades. It reveals that a country's accumulation of unsustainable debt stems from such factors as deficiencies in macroeconomic management, adverse terms-of-trade shocks, and poor governance. Debt-relief initiatives have provided debt-burdened...

Debt vulnerabilities in low-income countries have increased substantially in recent years. Since 2013, median government debt has risen by about 20 percentage points of gross domestic product and increasingly comes from non-concessional and private sources. As a result, in most low-income...

1. Brief history of debt management until 1989 -- 2. Brief history of debt management after 1989 -- 3. In quest of solutions : sovereign insolvency proposals, collective action clauses and recent country cases -- 4. Gleneagles, the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative and the US crisis -- 5. The...