Examining historical sovereign debt crises in developing and transition economies, this text concludes that these occurrences have been economic and social catastrophes and are likely to happen again in the future due to the 'boom and bust' nature of economic cycles

Developing country debt crises have been a recurrent phenomenon over the past two centuries. In recent times sovereign debt insolvency crises in developing and emerging economies peaked in the 1980s and, again, from the middle 1990s to the start of the new millennium. Despite the fact that...