IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pia/review/v2y2011i3n1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Debt Sustainability Assessment: Mission Impossible

Author

Listed:
  • Charles Wyplosz

Abstract

Debt sustainability is a vexing issue. Its importance is immediately obvious but it escapes any easy definition. This situation is not unheard of in economics; price stability and full employment are examples of other crucially important policy objectives that cannot be simply defined. Yet, while price stability or full employment can both be measured with a reasonable degree of precision, debt sustainability cannot even be measured directly.

Suggested Citation

  • Charles Wyplosz, 2011. "Debt Sustainability Assessment: Mission Impossible," Review of Economics and Institutions, Università di Perugia, vol. 2(3).
    • Handle: RePEc:pia:review:v:2:y:2011:i:3:n:1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rei.unipg.it/rei/article/view/42
    Download Restriction: Requires registration. Users must be registered and log in to access full text

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Eduardo Borensztein & Ugo Panizza, 2009. "The Costs of Sovereign Default," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 56(4), pages 683-741, November.
    2. Kenneth Arrow & Partha Dasgupta & Lawrence Goulder & Gretchen Daily & Paul Ehrlich & Geoffrey Heal & Simon Levin & Karl-Göran Mäler & Stephen Schneider & David Starrett & Brian Walker, 2004. "Are We Consuming Too Much?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 18(3), pages 147-172, Summer.
    3. Eduardo Borensztein & Olivier D Jeanne & Paolo Mauro & Jeronimo Zettelmeyer & Marcos d Chamon, 2005. "Sovereign Debt Structure for Crisis Prevention," IMF Occasional Papers 237, International Monetary Fund.
    4. Oya Celasun & Xavier Debrun & Jonathan D. Ostry, 2006. "Primary Surplus Behavior and Risks to Fiscal Sustainability in Emerging Market Countries: A "Fan-Chart" Approach," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 53(3), pages 1-3.
    5. Andrew Berg & Rafael A Portillo & Edward F Buffie & Catherine A Pattillo & Luis-Felipe Zanna, 2012. "Public Investment, Growth, and Debt Sustainability; Putting together the Pieces," IMF Working Papers 12/144, International Monetary Fund.
    6. Burda, Michael & Wyplosz, Charles, 2017. "Macroeconomics: a European Text," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, edition 7, number 9780198737513.
    7. Jonathan David Ostry & Abdul d Abiad, 2005. "Primary Surpluses and sustainable Debt Levels in Emerging Market Countries," IMF Policy Discussion Papers 05/6, International Monetary Fund.
    8. Bulow, Jeremy & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1989. "A Constant Recontracting Model of Sovereign Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(1), pages 155-178, February.
    9. Philippe D Karam & Douglas Hostland, 2005. "Assessing Debt Sustainability in Emerging Market Economies Using Stochastic Simulation Methods," IMF Working Papers 05/226, International Monetary Fund.
    10. Olivier Jeanne & Jeromin Zettelmeyer, 2001. "International bailouts, moral hazard and conditionality," Economic Policy, CEPR;CES;MSH, vol. 16(33), pages 407-432, October.
    11. Marcio Garcia & Roberto Rigobon, 2004. "A Risk Management Approach to Emerging Market's Sovereign Debt Sustainability with an Application to Brazilian Data," NBER Working Papers 10336, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Missale, Alessandro, 1999. "Public Debt Management," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198290858.
    13. Carmen M. Reinhart & M. Belen Sbrancia1, 2015. "The liquidation of government debt," Economic Policy, CEPR;CES;MSH, vol. 30(82), pages 291-333.
    14. Axel Schimmelpfennig & Nouriel Roubini & Paolo Manasse, 2003. "Predicting Sovereign Debt Crises," IMF Working Papers 03/221, International Monetary Fund.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos & John Milios & Spyros Lapatsioras, 2014. "An Outline of a Progressive Resolution to the Euro-area Sovereign Debt Overhang: How a Five-year Suspension of the Debt Burden Could Overthrow Austerity," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_819, Levy Economics Institute.
    2. Corsetti, G. & Erce, A. & Uy, T., 2017. "Official Sector Lending Strategies During the Euro Area Crisis," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1730, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    3. Maximilien Kaffo Melou & Mariusz A. Sumlinski & Chris Geiregat, 2014. "An Application of the "Fan-Chart Approach" to Debt Sustainability in Post-HIPC Low-Income Countries," IMF Working Papers 14/102, International Monetary Fund.
    4. Oblath, Gábor & Halpern, László, 2014. "A gazdasági stagnálás "színe" és fonákja. Mivel jár együtt az exporttöbblet és az adósságcsökkenés?
      [The bright" and gloomy side of economic stagnation]      ," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(7), pages 757-800.
    5. Cyrus MUTUKU, 2015. "Assessing Fiscal Policy Cyclicality and Sustainability: A Fiscal Reaction Function for Kenya," Journal of Economics Library, KSP Journals, vol. 2(3), pages 173-191, September.
    6. Paret, Anne-Charlotte, 2017. "Debt sustainability in emerging market countries: Some policy guidelines from a fan-chart approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 26-45.
    7. Cui, Wei, 2017. "Macroeconomic effects of delayed capital liquidation," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 86156, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    public debts; budget balance; sustainability;

    JEL classification:

    • E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy
    • E37 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pia:review:v:2:y:2011:i:3:n:1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Ubaldo Pizzoli). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/deperit.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.