The burden of past restructuring of the external debt of developing countries has been distributed asymmetrically among creditors owing to the lack of incentives for voluntary debt reduction. "New creditors" have been deterred from lending voluntarily because their claims would inevitably be...

The Brady Plan is the first official proposal to give priority to a tangible reduction in the debtor countries' debt service burden and is thus a milestone along the path towards overcoming the international debt crisis. However, the instruments foreseen in the Plan virtually invite criticism...

While the external debt of the least developed countries (LLDCs) is no threat to the international financial system, its adverse impact on the development efforts of many of these countries is severe. The following article examines their debt and economic situation and reviews major elements of...

The Brady Initiative has led to the conclusion of several debt-relief agreements. Opinion on the effects of these agreements on the debtor countries involved vary widely. The following article aims at clarifying the debate.

At the beginning of the 1990s debt accumulation has become persistent and the growth-cum-debt models which previously guided international lending offer no solution to the problem. The following article argues that major deficiencies in the methods used until now to assess the creditworthiness...

The disappointing response to the Mexican debt-swap initiative has shown that financial innovations cannot be relied on solely to reduce the debt burden to levels that reestablish the creditworthiness of major debtors. The following article examines the conventional approach to solving the debt...

In search of solutions to the international debt crisis, attention has recently been focused on a new financing technique, so-called debt-equity swaps. An essential difference between these and the usual swapping of debt into equity is that the former allow a wider range of applications. The...