The G-8 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) is the next step of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). There are two reasons why MDRI is unlikely to help poor countries. First, the amount of money at stake is trivial. The roughly $2 billion of annual debt payments to be...

In this paper I analyze the relationship between fiscal policy, aggregate public sector debt sustainability, and debt relief. I develop a methodology to compute the fiscal policy path that is compatible with aggregate debt sustainability in the post-HIPC era. The model explicitly considers the...

This paper develops a cross-country statistical model of debt rescheduling, and the secondary market valuation of LDC debt, which links these variables to key structural characteristics of developing countries, such as the trade regime, the degree of income inequality, and the share of...

Since August 1982 the international debt crisis has dominated economic policymaking in the developing countries, economic relations between the debtor and creditor countries, the attention of the multilateral institutions in their dealings with the debtor nations, and private sector decisions on...

The U.S. has significant interests involved in the world debt problem. It affects the profitability and even the stability of our banking system, but the debt problem also matters because debt service requires trade surpluses for debt- ors. Debtor countries have made their goods extra...

The major theme of this paper is that the commercial banks have weathered the debt crisis, while many debtor countries remain in economic paralysis or worse. There is a growing consensus that much of the LDC debt will not be fully serviced in the future, and that consensus is reflected in at...

The COVID-19 epidemic in emerging markets risks a combined health, economic, and debt crisis. We integrate a standard epidemiology model into a sovereign default model and study how default risk impacts the ability of these countries to respond to the epidemic. Lockdown policies are useful for...

This paper examines the tradeoffs facing creditors of a country whose debt is large enough that the country cannot attract voluntary new lending. If the country is unable to meet its debt service requirements out of current income, the creditors have two choices. They can finance the country,...

With the rapid increase in LDC indebtedness in the recent decade, the issues of creditworthiness and country risk have gained new importance. This paper offers a theoretical and historical analysis of international capital markets in the presence of default risk. The theoretical model suggests...

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...