IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sptchp/978-3-030-00989-2_7.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Public Debt

In: Public Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Burkhard Heer

    (University of Augsburg)

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, we observed many public debt crises in Latin America and Asia. Prior to, during, and after the financial crisis of 2007–2008, we also observed many countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU) with severe public debt problems. Government debt has increased to unprecedented levels in the post-World War II era in the so-called “GIIPS” countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). The Greek, Spanish, and Italian governments have had to pay premiums of 16, 3, and 3 percentage points on their public debt relative to Germany. Consequently, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, initiated a program whereby the ECB extended 3-year loans in the amount of 1 trillion (!) euros to the Eurozone banking sector. Interest rates subsequently converged, but debt levels remain high and still amounted to 179%, 100%, and 132% of GDP in Greece, Spain, and Italy in 2015, almost 10 years after the onset of the crisis. As a second major second case of severe public debt, Japan had accumulated a gross public debt equal to approximately 240% of GDP by 2015.

Suggested Citation

  • Burkhard Heer, 2019. "Public Debt," Springer Texts in Business and Economics, in: Public Economics, chapter 7, pages 321-377, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sptchp:978-3-030-00989-2_7
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-00989-2_7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    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:spr:sptchp:978-3-030-00989-2_7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.