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Foreign Debt (foreign + debt)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	58%
Humanities and Social Sciences	33%

Selected Abstracts

Foreign Debt and Literary Credit: Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 1 2010
KELLY AUSTIN
The article draws in relief how translators carry with them cultural and ideological horizons that necessarily imbue their literary production with distinctly situated historical, political, and personal dimensions. It does so first by examining how The New York Times's translation of Pablo Neruda's 1972 address to the PEN Club reframes (or distorts) his views on political and literary issues ranging from the negotiation of the Chilean national debt to his literary indebtedness to Walt Whitman, and then by examining how Neruda's 1955 translation of Whitman's ,Salut Au Monde!', refashions and relocates Whitman's work, imbuing it with a communist ethos consistent with Neruda's own. [source]

Foreign debt and economic growth

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 3 2001
Shuanglin Lin
This paper empirically examines the relationship between government foreign debt and the growth rate of per capita GDP based on a total sample of 77 countries, as well as sub-samples of various regions. Cross-sectional estimates of the coefficient of foreign debt based on the total sample have a negative sign, but are not always statistically significant. Available data from African countries indicate that foreign debt and the growth rate of per capita GDP were negatively related at a high level of significance. For industrialized and Latin American sub-samples, this relationship is negative but statistically insignificant. The sub-sample Asian and other developing countries show a positive but insignificant relationship. JEL classification: F34, H6, O23. [source]

The Prospects for Foreign Debt Sustainability in Post-Completion-Point Countries: Implications of the HIPC-MDRI Framework

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 2 2008
Jacinta Nwachukwu
The Enhanced HIPC Initiative was launched in 1999 to reduce the Net Present Value (NPV) of foreign debt of the world's poorest countries to a sustainable threshold of 150% of their exports. This article applies a simple growth-with-debt model to 16 post-completion-point HIPCs to assess whether this goal will be met by 2015. Its somewhat optimistic base-case projections suggest that participation in the current Enhanced HIPC-MDRI initiative will only reduce the NPV of their total external debt to 176% of exports by this date. Sensitivity tests which expose these countries to adverse exogenous shocks help draw attention to policies that could ensure that they do not again accumulate unsustainable debt levels. [source]

INCOME DISTRIBUTION, SOVEREIGN DEBT, AND PUBLIC INVESTMENT

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 3 2005
Cem Karayalçin
We develop a political economy model of sovereign debt that shows that income inequality leads to popular pressures on the government to use foreign debt to finance a redistribution of income at the expense of productive public investment. Recognizing this fact, international lenders impose credit ceilings with the consequence that developing country borrowers invest less and grow slower. [source]

Institutional Environment and Sovereign Credit Ratings

FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2006
Alexander W. Butler
We use a sample of 86 counties to examine the cross-sectional determinants of sovereign credit ratings. We find that the quality of a country's legal and political institutions plays a vital role in determining these ratings. A one-standard-deviation increase in our legal environment index results in an average credit rating increase of 0.466 standard deviations, even when we control for obvious factors such as GDP per capita, inflation, foreign debt per GDP, previous defaults, and general development. Although part of this effect is due to the legal environment's endogeneity, its relative importance is robust to endogeneity concerns. [source]

Foreign debt and economic growth

OPTIMAL FOREIGN BORROWING REVISITED

THE JAPANESE ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 3 2010
HYEON-SEUNG HUH
Foreign capital has become increasingly important in financing investment and growth in developing countries. Foreign capital flows, however, can be volatile as is evident from the recent financial crises. It has also recently been noted by researchers that there is little systematic empirical evidence that foreign capital contributes to the economic growth of developing countries. In this context, this paper attempts to theoretically reevaluate the borrowing behaviour of a developing economy that relies on foreign borrowing for its capital formation. In particular, this paper investigates the implications of different lending policies of international financial institutions. It is found that no matter whether the borrowing interest rate increases with the level of foreign debt per capita or with the foreign-capital/total-capital ratio, the economy always moves toward the stationary state. The result holds even when the representative agent regards the interest rate given as constant. This implies that foreign borrowing does help economic growth, irrespective of lending policies of international financial institutions. [source]

RECOVERY FROM DEPRESSION: AUSTRALIA IN AN ARGENTINE MIRROR 1895,1913

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 3 2006
Article first published online: 20 OCT 200, Ian W. McLean
Argentina; Australia; debt crisis; recovery policies The recovery from the 1890s depression in Australia was prolonged, and economic growth from 1895 to 1913 was below that in the comparable settler economies of Argentina and Canada. Why? Australia's hesitant initial recovery is typically attributed to the imbalances in the economy resulting from the preceding boom, and its further delay to severe drought. Drawing on Argentine experience, it is suggested that additional factors need to be considered. Unlike Argentina, the unwillingness or inability of Australian governments to reschedule foreign debt or devalue the exchange rate exacerbated the slump. And the era of low-cost pioneer farming ended earlier than in Argentina (or Canada). [source]

Country Default Risk: An Empirical Assessment

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 4 2001
Jerome L. Stein
We provide benchmarks to evaluate what is an optimal foreign debt and a maximal foreign debt (debt-max), when risk is explicitly considered. When the actual debt exceeds debt-max, then the economy will default when a ,bad shock' occurs. This paper is an application of the stochastic optimal controls models of Fleming and Stein (2001), which gives empirical content to the question of how one should measure ,vulnerability' to shocks, when there is uncertainty concerning the productivity of capital. We consider two sets of high-risk countries during the period 1978,99: a subset of 21 countries that defaulted on the debt, and another set of 13 countries that did not default. Default is a situation where the firms or government of a country reschedule the interest/principal payments on the external debt. We thereby explain how our analysis can anticipate default risk, and add another dimension to the literature of early warning signals of default/credit risk. [source]

Central America's Foreign Debt Burden and the HIPC Initiative

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 1 2001
Gerardo Esquivel
This paper reviews the foreign debt burden in Central America with special emphasis on Honduras and Nicaragua. These countries have a large debt overhang and they have lagged behind the rest of the region in terms of economic growth. Our work suggests that Honduras and Nicaragua require alleviation of their foreign debt as a prerequisite to achieve sustained economic growth. The paper also reviews the initiative aimed at reducing the debt burden of the highly indebted poor countries (the HIPC Initiative) and evaluates alternative scenarios of debt reduction for both Honduras and Nicaragua. It ends with a critical assessment of the implications of the fiscal and openness criteria established in the HIPC Initiative. [source]

Natural resources and ,gradual' reform in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan

NATURAL RESOURCES FORUM, Issue 4 2003
Richard Auty
Abstract Among low-income transition reformers, natural resource rents are an important initial condition that helps explain choice of reform strategy. Resource-rich Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and resource-poor China and Vietnam all claim to pursue gradual reform, but their strategies differ. In China and Vietnam, low resource rents have nurtured developmental political conditions and encouraged efficient resource use, which initially promoted agriculture as a dynamic market sector, capable of absorbing labour from the lagging state sector. In contrast, the scale and ease of natural resource rent extraction in the Central Asian countries has consolidated authoritarian governments that postpone reform. Despite high energy rents, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan still extract agricultural rents in ways that repress farm incentives, perpetuate environmental degradation and liquidate irrigation assets. Uzbekistan uses its rents to subsidize a manufacturing sector, that is neither dynamic nor competitive. As its dynamic sector, Turkmenistan promotes natural gas exports that depend on volatile markets. Resource-driven development models suggest that reform is required in both countries to avert a growth collapse. Turkmenistan's large energy rent-stream may postpone a collapse for some years, but Uzbekistan's position is already precarious: it has run down its rural infrastructure and accumulated sizeable foreign debts and will require external assistance to recover from a growth collapse. Such assistance should be made conditional on accelerated economic and political reform. [source]