Overcoming Developing Country Debt Crises
- Overview
- Table of Contents
Developing country debt crises have been a recurrent phenomenon over the past two centuries. In recent times sovereign debt insolvency crises in developing and emerging economies peaked in the 1980s and, again, from the middle 1990s to the start of the new millennium. Despite the fact that several developing countries now have stronger economic fundamentals than they did in the 1990s, sovereign debt crises will reoccur again.
The reasons for this are numerous, but the central one is that economic fluctuations are inherent features of financial markets, the boom and bust nature of which intensify under liberalized financial environments that developing countries have increasingly adopted since the 1970s. Indeed, today we are in the midst of an almost unprecedented global "bust." The timing of the book is important. The conventional wisdom is that the international economic and financial system is broken. Policymakers in both the poorest and the richest countries are likely to seriously consider how to restructure the international trade and financial system, including how to resolve sovereign debt crises in a more effective and fair manner.
This book calls for the international reform of sovereign debt workouts which derives from both economic theory and real-world experiences. Country case studies underline the point that we need to do better. This book recognizes that the politics of the international treatment of sovereign debt have not supported systemic reform efforts thus far; however, failure in the past does not preclude success in the future in an evolving international political environment, and the book thus puts forth alternative reform ideas for consideration.
About the Editors
Barry Herman
Visiting Senior Fellow, Graduate Program
International Affairs
The New School
Barry Herman is Visiting Senior Fellow at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of The New School in New York. In addition, he is Co-chair of the Task Force on Debt Restructuring and Sovereign Bankruptcy at the initiative for Policy Dialogue. He completed almost thirty years in the United Nations Secretariat in 2005, the last two years of which were as Senior Adviser in the Financing for Development Office in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).
José Antonio Ocampo
Professor of International and Public Affairs
School of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University
Jose Antonio Ocampo is Co-President of IPD, Professor of Professional Practice in the School of International and Public Affairs, and Fellow of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Prior to his appointment at Columbia, Professor Ocampo served as the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, and head of UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), as Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and has held a number of high-level posts in the Government of Colombia, including Minister of Finance and Public Credit, Director of the National Planning Department, and Minister of Agriculture . Professor Ocampo is author or editor of over 30 books and has published over 200 scholarly articles on macroeconomic theory and policy, international financial issues, economic development, international trade, and Colombian and Latin American economic history.
Shari Spiegel
Principal
New Holland Capital, PLC
Shari Spiegel joined UN DESA as a Senior Economic Affairs Officer in May 2010. She is co-author and co-editor of several of books and articles on capital and financial markets, debt, and macroeconomics and has an MA (ABD) in economics from Princeton University and a BA in applied mathematics and economics from Northwestern University. Ms. Spiegel served as Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) from 2002 to 2007 and was an adjunct professor and lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University during the same time period. She is Co-chair of the Task Force on Debt Restructuring and Sovereign Bankruptcy at IPD. She has extensive experience at the private sector, holding positions at Citibank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, and most recently as a Principal at New Holland Capital and as head of fixed-income emerging markets at Lazard Asset Management. She also served as an advisor to the Hungarian Central Bank in the early 1990s.
Publication Information
| Type | Books |
| Program | Debt Restructuring and Sovereign Bankruptcy |
| Download | 167kb pdf |
| Posted | 04/01/10 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year | 2010 |
| # Pages | 424pp |
