This study develops an early warning signal (EWS) of government debt crisis using a panel data consisting of 43 developing countries over the period of 1960 to 2017. It employs two different methods: the noise to signal ratio to capture the signaling power of individual indicators; and the...

Rising public debt in sub-Saharan Africa remains a matter of concern. We provide an analysis of public debt and debt sustainability in Tanzania, focusing on external debt. Though current and previous analyses using the IMF-World Bank debt sustainability framework indicate low risk of public...

The euro area sovereign debt crisis has highlighted the importance of reducing public debt levels and building up sufficient fiscal buffers during normal and good times. It has also reaffirmed the need for a thorough debt sustainability analysis (DSA) to act as a warning system for national...

In relation to GDP, India's public debt and interest payments are high compared with most other emerging economies and rating agencies have put India's sovereign debt at the lowest investment grade. On the other hand, India benefits from strong economic growth and needs to increase spending on...

Natural disasters have caused, and continue to cause, a significant amount of economic costs. The costs of disasters are often, and to a large extent, shouldered by governments, especially in economies where private insurance markets are not well developed. Governments are asked to provide...

This paper investigates whether fiscal fatigue is a robust characteristic of the fiscal reaction function in a panel of OECD countries over the period 1970-2014 or merely an artifact of ignoring important aspects of the panel dimension of the data. More specifically, we test whether the...

New monthly statistical indicators on government debt securities for euro area countries have now been developed on the basis of the information contained in the Centralised Securities Database (CSDB), an internal database available to the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). The CSDB is...

We construct comprehensive public sector balance sheets for Finland for 2000-2016 by complementing general government statistics with data on public corporations and pensions. These static balance sheets show that Finland's public sector net worth at end 2016 was - 160 percent of GDP, after...