Hungary’s net external liabilities have increased significantly in recent years and its external liabilities-to-GDP ratio currently stands at a very high level by international standards. As the credit market crisis emanating from the Unites States has put renewed emphasis on the vulnerability...

In financial and economic policy circles concerned with public debt in developing countries, a rising debt-GDP ratio is interpreted as a signal of overborrowing, warning of debt defaults if strong fiscal corrections are not adopted in time. This paper shows why this interpretation is incorrect...

This paper critically assesses the standard IMF analytical framework for debt sustainability in emerging markets. It focuses on complementarities and trade-offs between fiscal and external sustainability, and interactions and feedbacks among policy and endogenous variables affecting debt ratios....

The aim of this study is to assess the exchange rate risk associated with the Tunisian public debt portfolio through Value-at-Risk (VaR) methodology. We use daily spot exchange rates of the Tunisian dinar against the three main debt currencies, the dollar, the euro and the yen. Our period of...

We revisit the debt overhang question. We first use non-parametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial) debt ends...

We build a tractable stylized model of external sovereign debt and endogenous international interest rates. In corrupt economies with rent-seeking groups stealing public resources, a politico-economic equilibrium is characterized by permanent fiscal impatience which leads to excessive issuing of...

The Greek government budget situation plays a central role in the debt crisis in the euro area. The debt to GDP ratio is above 150 percent, while the defi cit to GDP ratio exceeds 10 percent. To re-establish the Maastricht criteria, respectively, strong consolidation measures need to be...

An unbalanced panel data of around fifty countries between 1985 and 2003 is used to estimate the vulnerability of public social expenditures (health and education) to other fiscal variables. The database allows comparisons between Latin America and the rest of developing countries. Public social...

We estimate the pricing of sovereign risk for sixty countries based on fiscal space (debt/tax; deficits/tax) and other economic fundamentals over 2005-10. We measure how accurately the model predicts sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads, focusing in particular on the five countries in the...

Spain is currently facing its worst crisis in the last fifty years. The crisis began as an extension of the international financial crisis, but the internal imbalances accumulated in the pre-crisis period aggravated the situation. At present their incomplete adjustment is making difficult the...