The threat of a major debt crisis is presently hanging over the international financial community like Damocles' sword. Behind the crisis lies the flood of petrodollars into the financial institutions of the industrial world since the mid 1970s and the consequent large-scale lending to...

Over the past decade the non-oil developing countries’ external debt has shown a more than threefold increase, a trend that may be expected to continue in the foreseeable future. In response to the recipient countries’ changing needs, private lending, their principal source of credit, will...

Developing countries with considerable mineral reserves might be expected to have fewer problems with debt-servicing than other developing countries lacking these resources. In fact, during the past decade a not insignificant number of the former had to apply for a rescheduling of their foreign...

The Federal Republic of Germany, together with the United States of America, is one of the most determined opponents to the developing countries' demand for a general debt moratorium (and also the UNCTAD integrated programme on commodities). However, the outcome of recent international...

Since the financial crisis in 2008-09, concern over the sustainability of some EU countries’ sovereign debt has continued to mount higher and higher. This paper explores the ways in which the financial crisis caused the deterioration of European debt-to-GDP ratios, examines which countries are...

The intention for the Italian government to stimulate business activity via large increases in government spending is not in line with the stabilisation of the public debt ratio. Instead, if such policy were implemented, the risk of a sovereign debt crisis would be high. In this article, we...

In the 1970s Latin America accounted for a high, and constantly increasing, proportion of the total public foreign debt of all developing countries, reaching a share of 35% by the end of the decade. In comparison, Latin America's share of the total GDP of the developing countries is around 20%....