This study argues that a notion of current-account sustainability that considers the willingness to pay and to lend, in addition to intertemporal solvency, provides a better framework for understanding the variety of experiences countries have had with protracted current-account imbalances.

The present study departs from the conventional approach to world capital-market imperfections by relying on the notion of individual risk, rather than country risk. This difference of emphasis has important implications for the specification of intertemporal optimizing models of small indebted...