We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

Official controls on interest rates and capital flows rule out the use of traditional interest rate parity conditions to measure changes in the degree of capital mobility confronting developing countries. This paper develops an alternative technique for measuring the cost of undertaking...

This paper presents a framework for evaluating the relative contributions of different creditors in cases where only partial payments can be made by the debtor country. A methodology is developed to calculate partial payments—or alternatively put—determine residual financing. By focusing on...

A new aggregation scheme used to measure the sources of fiscal financing of indebted countries suggests that there was a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s. We argue that this was the revenue maximizing response of...