This paper analyzes some of the implications of the dual transfer a debtor nation must undertake to service foreign debt: (a) an internal transfer from the private sector to the public sector; and (b) an external transfer from the domestic economy to foreign creditors. It shows that, under likely circumstances, a real depreciation of the home currency may complicate the internal transfer. As long as non-traded goods are a net source of revenue for the government, the depreciation called for by debt service deteriorates the public sector's terms of trade vis-a-vis the private sector and magnifies the requisite fiscal retrenchment. The paper discusses the role of trade policy (tariffs and export subsidies) in substituting for devaluation. Generating a private-sector surplus via interest-rate policy is shown to have similar costs on the government budget when the public sector has outstanding domestic debt.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
2655.
Length: Date of creation: Jul 1988 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2655
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Dixit, Avinash, 1985.
"Tax policy in open economies,"
Handbook of Public Economics,
in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 6, pages 313-374
Elsevier.
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