Debt vulnerabilities in low-income countries have increased substantially in recent years. Since 2013, median government debt has risen by about 20 percentage points of gross domestic product and increasingly comes from non-concessional and private sources. As a result, in most low-income...

This paper explores bond-level, issuer-level, and macro-level conditions that affect the distance between sovereign credit rating and sub-sovereign debt ratings. Over three-quarters of rated foreign-currency sub-sovereign bonds issued during 1990–2013 in 47 emerging and developing countries...