This paper sets forth some basic principles that could help debt managers in emerging market and other countries to plan and implement sovereign debt buyback and swap operations. It discusses the macroeconomic context in which buybacks and swaps are undertaken, the objectives of buybacks and...

Public debt in the Middle East increased during the mid-1990s mainly because of fiscal expansions. It decreased in recent years, thanks to high oil revenue, economic growth, some primary non-oil fiscal adjustment, and debt relief. While countries in the Middle East appear to have adequately...

The paper analyzes Jamaica''s experience of low growth despite consistently high investment. Cross-country analysis provides evidence of a significant and negative relationship between total public debt and productivity growth. Looking at the specific channels through which high debt affects...

The effects of the IMF''s data standards initiatives on sovereign borrowing costs in private capital markets are investigated for 26 emerging market and developing countries. Stable and significant panel econometric estimates indicate that subscription to the Special Data Dissemination Standard...

This book, edited by Jacob A. Frenkel, Michael P. Dooley, and Peter Wickham, presents a sample of the work of the IMF and that of world-renowned scholars on the analytical issues surrounding the explosion of countries with debt-servicing difficulties and describes debt initiatives and...

The literature on optimal fiscal policy finds that highly volatile real returns on government debt, for example through surprise inflation, have very low costs. However, policymakers are almost always very apprehensive of this option. The paper discusses evidence concerning features of...

This paper contains an empirical investigation of the set of economic and political conditions that are associated with a likely occurrence of a sovereign debt crisis. We use a new statistical approach (Binary Recursive Tree) that allows us to derive a collection of ""rules of thumb"" that help...

This paper addresses how public debt should be managed to reduce the cost of private sector bailouts. It uses a tax smoothing model to show that bailouts affect the timing of government deficits and surpluses as well as the composition of public debt. In general, public debt managers will have...

This paper provides comprehensive empirical evidence that supports the predictions of Sargent and Wallace''s (1981) ""unpleasant monetarist arithmetic"" that an increase in public debt is typically inflationary in countries with large public debt. Drawing on an extensive panel dataset, we find...

On occasions, by running arrears, governments have unilaterally borrowed from domestic agents. These agents ended up with implicit claims on the government for which they had no title and that would be honored, at best, on an unspecified future date and for an uncertain value. Having untitled...