Government Debt in Emerging Market Countries: A New Data Set

Abstract

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper presents a new database on government debt in 19 emerging market countries since 1980. The data set focuses on the structure of debt in terms of jurisdiction of insurance, maturity, currency composition and indexation. The paper presents stylized facts on debt structures and preliminary evidence on their determinants. We observe substantial crosscountry variation in the structure of domestic debt and find it to be associated with countries' record of monetary stability.

r minus g negative

“…The average effective interest rate on debt is computed as the ratio of the interest bill in year t to the stock of government debt (average of debt stocks of year-end t and t − 1) from the sources above. The marginal cost of borrowing (in most cases, yield to maturity on the secondary market) is compiled from Mauro, Sussman and Yafeh (2002) for 1870-1914and Datastream-updated to June 2019 External public debt comes from a dataset assembled by the IMF staff using the WB-IMF Quarterly Public Sector Debt, OECD Central Government Debt, WEO, Guscina and Jeanne (2006)…”

Public Debt Through the Ages

“…1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 Domestic MLT debt Foreign currency-denominated debt Domestic MLT debt in G-20 Advanced Economies Figure 8. Debt Composition in Emerging Economies (Shares in percent of total public debt) Sources: Guscina and Jeanne (2006) and authors' calculations. Notes: G-20 emerging countries included are Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey.…”

International Government Debt

“…In turn, bad policies reduce ability to pay because they are associated with high macroeconomic volatility and low economic growth. Therefore, a bad debt structure is not the fundamental cause of debt crisis; it is simply a symptom of a deeper domestic problem (Burger and Warnock, 2006, Guscina and Jeanne, 2006, and Claessens, Klingebiel, and Schmukler, 2007, find a correlation between debt composition and the quality of policies and institutions). With respect to policy prescriptions, this view maintains that the only way in which developing countries will be able to sustain higher levels of debt is by addressing the more fundamental problems, and in particular, by improving their institutions and legal frameworks.,In the meantime, developing countries should maintain relatively low levels of debt.…”

“…14 Recent attempts at collecting data on the composition and level of total public debt for various subsets of developing countries have made some inroads. These include Jeanne and Guscina (2006), Cowan, Levy Yeyati, Panizza, and Sturzenegger (2006), Christensen (2005), IMF (2006), Jaimovich and Panizza (200X), Panizza (2008) and Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). Jeanne and Guscina (2006) and Cowan et al (2006) 1998-2004period.…”