Il rimborso del debito estero dei paesi in via di sviluppo: un’analisi del periodo 1971-1986 - Foreign Debt Repayment by Developing Countries: An Analysis of the 1971-1986 period

The risk of a financial crisis connected. to the sizeable loans granted by financial institutions to developing countries has necessitated examining the possibility that countries renegotiate, or even refuse to repay, their foreign debt. The aim of this paper, which considers the 15 countries of the Baker Plan following an approach that has in part been inherited from previous analysis and is in part innovative, is to pinpoint the most suitable indicators for predicting similar eases. The results obtained tend to attribute the debt repayment crisis that took piece between 1971 and 1986 to the reductions in the exchange reserves and also to the impossibility of activating « hyperspeculative » management of the new debt flows (together with the pressing internal problems of the developing countries) rather than to their general indebtedness (ne shown in the Debt/GNP and Debt Service/Exports indicators). It seems reasonable to hypothesize that these countries « accept » their considerable indebtedness by relying on temporary speculative operations, the only effete of which is that of postponing the problem. When this kind of solution is unavailable, the countries in question are inevitably forced to re-negotiate repayment terms. R. J.