Suchergebnisse

Is generalized debt relief an effective development strategy, or should assistance be tailored to countries' characteristics? To answer this question, the authors build a simple model in which recipient governments reveal their creditworthiness if donors offer them to choose between aid and debt relief. Since offering such a menu is costly, it is preferred by donors only when the cost of assistance is low, and the probability that an indebted country is creditworthy is high enough. For lower probabilities and higher costs of assistance, donors prefer a policy of only debt relief. Very limited aid is the preferred policy only for high costs of assistance, and low probabilities that the government is creditworthy.

In March 2013 around 130 participants from academia, banking and finance, governments and central banking gathered at the premises of the OeNB in Vienna for a conference jointly organized by the European Money and Finance Forum SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research to discuss "The Future of Sovereign Borrowing." The financial, economic and sovereign debt crisis has fundamentally changed the rules of the game in sovereign debt markets, particularly in the euro area, but also beyond its borders. Sovereign bonds are no longer widely perceived as 'risk-free' assets. Even the sovereign bonds of safe-haven countries have come under close scrutiny or lost some of their prime ratings. Yet crisis countries have seen dramatic downgrades of their sovereign debt ratings so that they face soaring risk spreads and unsustainably high financing costs (or even a loss of access to bond market financing), pushing them towards shorter financing or forcing them to rely on financial support from other countries and the international community or massive intervention by central banks.