The paper discusses and revisits some of the most popular stories behind the 2001 financial crisis in Argentina, i.e. the prolonged overvaluation of the peso owing to the Currency Board arrangement, the lack of fiscal adjustment, and the negative external environment which triggered a “sudden...

This paper is a review of the different approaches on external debt sustainability. The Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative was launched to assure a permanent exit from debt dependence. However, the IMF-World Bank program is not without faults, in particular for what concerns debt...

Congress asked GAO to estimate the value of FHA's Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund, a capital reserve which backs most of FHA's single- family mortgages. This technical appendix presents estimates of the claim and non-claim termination propensities of single-family FHA mortgages. Competing risks...

All developed countries have government debt, usually a sizeable proportion of output. This paper proposes that governments that cannot commit to future policy choices face a trade-off that explains the level of debt. On the one hand, the government would like to increase debt and delay...

The purposes of this paper are twofold: first, it aims at critically evaluating the solvency criterion, pioneered by Hamilton and Flavin (1986), which is nowadays almost hegemonic in the analysis of public debt sustainability, and at illustrating alternative measures of sustainability grounded...

The main rationale for fiscal policy rules is the concern for long term sustainability of public finances, that in a monetary union may affect the other members. Among many other criticisms, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has been seen as contradictory or incomplete because it focuses on...

We postulate a new method of identifying debt which we call Debt Burden (DB). We claim that DB reveals the true debt obligations of the fiscal authority. It is more accurate and transparent. Hence, DB would serve fiscal authority much better in policy making. It is powerful in a sense that it is...

This paper examines the growth pattern followed by the Chilean economy with reference to the macroeconomic reforms undertaken during the Pinochet regime, which were largely maintained by successive democratic administrations and partially reproduced by neighbouring countries. The focus is on the...

Borrowing and lending between sovereign parties is modeled as intertemporal barter that smoothes the consumption of a risk-averse party subject to endowment shocks. The surplus anticipated in the relationship offers sufficient incentive for cooperation by all parties, including any other...

In this paper I investigate the effects of recent debt relief initiatives such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Debt Initiative of 1996 on resource flows to developing countries. Focusing on a sample of low-income countries, I concentrate on the following questions. First, is the...