The increased access of African countries to international capital markets has put public debt sustainability once again high on the continentś policy agenda. Utilizing the "stabilizing primary balance" approach, we find that the primary balances exceeded those required to keep public debt at...

This paper uses cross country regression analysis on a large set of countries to consider two hypotheses. The first is that increased public debt as a percentage of the economy reduces confidence in financial institutions. The second is that increased public debt relative to the economy lowers...