This paper assesses debt sustainability in Guatemala. Debt stability has been achieved at very low expenditure levels, at the expense of adequate provisioning of public goods and services and a widening gap in social development and infrastructure. Since fiscal outcomes are not independent from...

Despite the frequency of official debt restructurings, little systematic evidence has been produced on their characteristics and implications. Using a dataset covering more than 400 Paris Club agreements, this paper aims to fill that gap. It provides a comprehensive description of the evolving...

Sovereign debt crises involve debt restructurings characterized by a mix of face-value haircuts and maturity extensions. The prevalence of maturity extensions has been hard to reconcile with economic theory. We develop a model of endogenous debt restructuring that captures key facts of sovereign...

The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the...

Fiscal rules have gained popularity as tools to strengthen debt sustainability by constraining policy discretion. However, their track record in the case of emerging markets is mixed, as setting up a fiscal rule has been no guarantee of debt stabilization. International experience and empirical...