The fiscal health of the Philippines has improved significantly over the past decade. Notwithstanding the dividends from reforms, challenges remain for the Philippines on the fiscal side. Policy coordination, primarily through the Development Budget Coordinating Committee, has helped to reduce...

Mainstream macroeconomists have a tendency to see debt as a flow variable, whereas heterodox economists emphasizes that debt should be understood as a stock-flow component in the economy. In this way changes in debt has to do with adjustments in assets and liabilities as well as in the servicing...

The often lambasted bailout loans granted by Europe and the IMF to Greece since 2010 have allowed the Greek government to enjoy effective funding costs not just similar but even much better than those of the highest quality sovereign debtors. Thanks to the bailouts and their incredibly generous...

Debt sustainability is fundamentally a probabilistic concept: Debt is rarely sustainable with probability one. We propose an index of external debt sustainability that reflects this uncertainty. Namely we construct the index as the probability that, at the current exchange rate, net external...