When Is External Debt Sustainable?

The article empirically examines the determinants of debt distress, defined as periods in which countries resort to any of three forms of exceptional finance: significant arrears on external debt, Paris Club rescheduling, and non-concessional Inter...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kraay, Aart, Nehru, Vikram
Language:English
en_US
Published: Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2006/09/17760901/external-debt-sustainable
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16425
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Summary:The article empirically examines the determinants of debt distress, defined as periods in which countries resort to any of three forms of exceptional finance: significant arrears on external debt, Paris Club rescheduling, and non-concessional International Monetary Fund lending. Probit regressions show that three factors explain a substantial fraction of the cross-country and time-series variation in the incidence of debt distress: the debt burden, the quality of policies and institutions, and shocks. The relative importance of these factors varies with the level of development. These results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications, and the core specifications have substantial out-of-sample predictive power. The quantitative implications of these results are examined for the lending strategies of official creditors.