Debt Against the People: an ABC

It is the combination of debt and free trade that constitute the fundamental factors subordinating whole economies as from the 19th century.

10/02/2020
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Summary  

  • Introduction
  • Historical examples
  • Debt during the 1960s and 70s
  • The debt crisis of the 1980s
  • Developments in the 2000s
  • General view of the debt in the South
  • Debt in the Global South
  • Africa
  • Latin America and the Caribbean
  • It is possible not to repay an illegitimate debt

 

Introduction

 

Over the last ten years, Greece has been a prime example of how a country and a people can be deprived of their liberty through clearly illegitimate debt. Since the 19th century, from Latin America to China, Haiti, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire public debt has been used as a coercive force to impose domination and pillage (Toussaint, 2017). Visibly, it is the combination of debt and free trade that constitute the fundamental factors subordinating whole economies as from the 19th century. Local elites allied themselves with big financial powers in order to subject their own countries and peoples permanently to methods of power that transfer wealth towards local and foreign creditors.

 

Contrary to commonplace ideas, it is generally not the indebted weaker countries that are the cause of sovereign debt crises. These crises break out first in the biggest capitalist countries or are the result of their unilateral decisions that produce effects of great magnitude in the indebted countries. It is not so-called “excessive” public spending that builds up unsustainable debt levels, but rather the conditions imposed by local and foreign creditors. Real interest rates are abusively high and so are bankers’ commissions. The indebted countries unable to keep up with repayments have to continually find new loans to repay old loans. In the past, when that became impossible, the great powers had licence to resort to military action to ensure they were repaid.

 

Debt crises and their outcomes are always directed by the big banks and the governments that support them.

 

Over the last two centuries, several countries have successfully repudiated debts by arguing that they were either illegitimate or odious. Mexico, the USA, Cuba, Russia, China and Costa Rica have all done this. Conflict involving debt non-payment has given birth to a judicial doctrine known as Odious Debt which is to this day pertinent (See box).

 

Open box on odious debt

 

According to the odious debt doctrine theorised by Alexander Sack in 1927 a debt may be considered odious if it fulfils two conditions:

  1. The population does not enjoy the benefits: the debt was incurred not in the interests of the people or the state but against their interest and/or in the personal interest of the leaders or persons holding power.
  2. Lenders’ complicity: the lenders had foreknowledge, or could have had foreknowledge, that the funds concerned would not benefit the population.

 

The democratic or despotic nature of a regime does not influence this general rule.

 

The father of the odious debt doctrine clearly states that “regular governments (may) incur debts that are incontestably odious”. Sack defines a regular government as follows: “By a regular government is to be understood the supreme power that effectively exists within the limits of a given territory. Whether that government be monarchical (absolute or limited) or republican; whether it functions by “the grace of God” or “the will of the people”; whether it express “the will of the people” or not, of all the people or only of some; whether it be legally established or not, etc., none of that is relevant to the problem we are concerned with. (my bold - ÉT).

Source: Les effets des transformations des États sur leurs dettes publiques et autres obligations financières (The effects of the transformation of States on their public debt and other financial obligations), Recueil Sirey, Paris, 1927. Abridged document freely available on the CADTM website (in French)

 

Sack says that a debt may be considered odious if: “a) that the purpose which the former government wanted to cover by the debt in question was odious and clearly against the interests of the population of the whole or part of the territory, and

b) that the creditors, at the moment of the issuance of the loan, were aware of its odious purpose.”

 

He continues: “Once these two points are established, the burden of proof that the funds were used for the general or special needs of the state and were not of an odious character would be upon the creditors.” (see https://www.cadtm.org/The-Doctrine-of-Odious-Debt-from)

 

This doctrine has been applied several times in history.

 

Historical examples

 

Creditors, whether powerful states, multilateral organisations that serve them or banks, have become very adroit at imposing their will on debtors. From early in the 19th century Haiti, the first independent black republic, was an early testing ground. The island gained freedom from the yoke of the French empire in 1804, but Paris did not abandon its claims on the country and obtained from Haiti payment of a royal indemnity granted to the former colonial slave owners. The 1825 agreements signed by the new Haitian leaders created a monumental debt of independence untenable from 1828 and which took a full century to pay off, thus preventing any real development.

 

Debt was also used to subjugate Tunisia under France in 1881 [1] and Egypt to the British in 1882. [2] The lending powers used unpaid debt to impose their will on countries that had so far been independent. Greece too, was born in the 1830s with a burden of debt that held it in the sway of Russia, France and the British, [3] Newfoundland, which had become the first autonomous dominion of the British Empire in 1855, well before Canada and Australia, had to renounce its independence in 1933 because of the grave economic crisis in order to face up to its debts and was finally incorporated into Canada in 1949. Canada agreed to take charge of 90% of Newfoundland’s debt (REINHARDT and ROGOFF, 2010).

 

 Debt during the 1960s and 70s

 

The process was repeated after the Second World War, when the Latin American countries had need of capital to fund their development and first Asian, then African, colonies gained independence. The debt was the principal instrument used to impose neocolonialist relations. It became frowned upon to use force against a debtor country, and new means of coercion had to be found.

 

The massive loans granted as from the 1960s, to an increasing number of peripheral countries (not least those in which the Western powers had a strategic interest such as Mobutu’s Congo, Suharto’s Indonesia, the military regimes in Brazil, Yugoslavia and Mexico) oiled a powerful mechanism that took back the control of countries that had begun to adopt policies that were truly independent of their former colonial powers and Washington.

 

Three big players have incited these countries into debt by promising relatively low interest rates:

  1. the big Western banks seeking to put massive amounts of liquidities to work;
  2. the developed countries seeking to stimulate their economies after the1973 oil crisis;
  3. the World Bank seeking to increase US influence and to fend off the increasing expansion of the private banks.

 

Local elites also encouraged higher debt and made gains, contrary to the populations, who derived no benefit.

 

The theoretical rants promoting high foreign debt

 

In neo-classical theory, savings should precede investment and are insufficient in the developing countries. This means that the shortage of savings is seen as a fundamental factor explaining why development is blocked. An influx of external funding is required. Paul Samuelson, in Economics (SAMUELSON, 1980), took the history of US indebtedness in the 19th and 20th centuries as a basis for determining four different stages leading to prosperity:

  1. young borrowing nation in debt (from the War of Independence in 1776 to the end of the Civil War in 1865);
  2. mature indebted nation (from 1873 to 1914);
  3. new lending nation (from the first to Second World Wars);
  4. mature lending nation (1960s).

 

Samuelson and his emulators slapped the model of US economic development from the late 18th century until the Second World War onto one hundred or so countries which made up the Third World after 1945, as though it were possible for all those countries to quite simply imitate the experience of the United States

 

As for the need to resort to foreign capital (in the form of loans and foreign investments), an associate of Walt W. Rostow, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, found the following formula: “Foreign capital will be a pure addition to domestic capital formation, i.e. it will all be invested; the investment will be productive or ‘businesslike’ and result in increased production. The main function of foreign capital inflow is to increase the rate of domestic capital formation up to a level which could then be maintained without any further aid”. This statement contradicts the facts. It is not true that foreign capital enhances the formation of national capital and is all invested. A large part of foreign capital rapidly leaves the country where it was temporarily directed, as capital flight and repatriation of profits.

 

Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, who was the assistant director of the Economics Department of the World Bank between 1946 and 1952, made another monumental error in predicting the dates when various countries would reach self-sustained growth. He reckoned that Colombia would reach that stage by 1965, Yugoslavia by 1966, Argentina and Mexico between 1965 and 1975, India in the early 1970s, Pakistan three or four years after India, and the Philippines after 1975. What nonsense that has proved to be!

 

Development planning as envisaged by the World Bank and US academia amounts to pseudo-scientific deception based on mathematical equations. It is supposed to give legitimacy and credibility to the intention to make the developing countries dependent on obtaining external capital. There follows an example, advanced in all seriousness by Max Millikan and Walt W. Rostow in 1957: “If the initial rate of domestic investment in a country is 5 per cent of national income, if foreign capital is supplied at a constant rate equal to one-third the initial level of domestic investment, if 25 per cent of all additions to income are saved and reinvested, if the capital-output ratio is 3 and if interest and dividend service on foreign loans and private investment are paid at the rate of 6 per cent per year, the country will be able to discontinue net foreign borrowing after fourteen years and sustain a 3 per cent rate of growth out of its own resources" (MILLIKAN and ROSTOW, 1957) More nonsense!

 

In fact, these authors who favoured the capitalist system, dominated by the US, refused to envisage the deep reforms that would have allowed a form of development that was not dependant on external funding.

 

The debt crisis of the 1980s

 

At the end of 1979 the US decided to increase its interest rates. This had an effect on the rates applied to indebted Southern countries whose borrowing rates were variable and had already been subject to sharp rises. Coupled with low export commodities prices (coffee, cacao, cotton, sugar, ores, etc.,) which caused reduced revenues for the countries, the trap was sprung.

 

In august 1982, Mexico, among other countries announced that they were unable to assure debt repayments. So, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was asked, by the creditor banks, to lend the countries the necessary funds at high interest rates, on the double condition that they continue debt repayments and apply the policies decided by the IMF “experts”: abandon subventions on goods and services of primary necessity; reduce public spending; devalue the currency; introduce high interest rates in order to attract foreign capital; direct agricultural production towards exportable products; free access to interior markets for foreign investors; liberalise the economies, including the suppression of capital controls; introduce a taxation system that aggravates inequalities, including VAT increases; preserve capital gains and privatize profitable publicly owned industries; this list is not exhaustive.

 

These structural adjustment loans were aimed at the suppression of independent economic and financial policies in the peripheral countries and tying their independence to the World markets. Also, to ensure access by the industrialized economies to the raw materials and they needed. By gradually putting the developing countries into competition with each other the economic model based on exports and the extraction of raw materials for foreign markets is reinforced, which in turn reduces production costs and increases profits, favouring the developed economies.

 

So, a new form of colonialism sprang up. It was no longer necessary to maintain an administration and an army to put the local population to heel; the debt did the job of creaming off the wealth produced and directing it to the creditors. Of course the colonialists continued to interfere in local politics and economic policies whenever they considered that it suited them.

 

Developments in the 2000s

 

As from 2003-04, in a context of strong world demand, commodity prices started to increase. Exporting countries improved their foreign exchange incomes. Some developing countries increased their social spending but most preferred to buy US treasury bonds and so put their increased means at the disposal of the principal economic powers. This increase in developing countries’ incomes whittled down the weight of the World Bank and the IMF.

 

Since 2018-19 a new debt crisis is hitting countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria and Mozambique.

 

Another factor was the Chinese economic expansion. China had become the world’s principal sweatshop and was accumulating important financial reserves and using them to significantly increase funding to developing countries in competition with the offers of funding from the industrialised countries and the multilateral institutions.

 

During the 2000s, the reduction of interest rates by the Central Banks in the industrialized countries in the North decreased the costs of the debt in the South. Because of the 2007-8 financial crisis in North America and Western Europe massive amounts of liquidities were injected into the financial system to save the big banks and corporations that were too heavily indebted themselves. A decrease in the costs of financing the debts of the developing countries followed naturally and the governments of developing countries gained a false sense of security.

 

The situation began to degrade in 2016-17 when the Fed started to raise its interest rates, from 0.25% in 2015 to 1.5% in October 2019 and tax breaks were granted by the Trump administration to big business to attract US foreign investment back to the US. What’s more, commodities prices slipped and exporter countries’ revenues slipped with them making debt repayments in strong

 

General view of the debt in the South

 

These last years have have seen a significant increase in constant values of foreign debt; between 2000 and 2017 it has tripled. The greater part is in the private sector.

 

Table1. - foreign debt by regions ($ billions)

 

1980

1990

2000

2012

2017

Latin America and the Caribbean

230

420

714

1258

1501

Sub-Saharan Africa

61

176

213

331

535

MENA [4]

64

137

144

177

294

South Asia

37

126

163

501

706

East Asia & Pacific

61

234

497

1412

2461

Central and Eastern European countries, Turkey & Central Asia

58

101

234

1150

1570

Total

510

1194

1966

4830

7070

Source: http://datatopics.worldbank.org/debt/ids/region/lmy

Foreign public debt has also increased although less abruptly than in the private sector.

 

Table 2. foreign public debt by regions ($ billions)

 

1980

1990

2000

2012

2017

Latin America and the Caribbean

126

314

385

577

721

Sub-Saharan Africa

42

144

162

200

342

MENA

54

114

112

121

178

South Asia

32

108

135

215

330

East Asia & Pacific

36

173

271

354

550

Central and Eastern European countries, Turkey & Central Asia

34

80

118

297

517

Total

323

932

1184

1766

2640

Source: http://datatopics.worldbank.org/debt/ids/region/lmy

Debt in the Global South

 

Whatever the World Bank and the IMF may cheerfully repeat, the debt of developing countries is still a major obstacle to meeting their inhabitants’ basic needs and safeguarding human rights. Inequalities have sharply increased and progress in terms of human development has been very limited.

 

Africa

 

Whatever the World Bank and the IMF may cheerfully repeat, the debt of developing countries is still a major obstacle to meeting their inhabitants’ basic needs and safeguarding human rights

 

In sub-Saharan Africa, outgoing flow of capital via debt service and corporations garnering their profits are significant. In 2012, the profits repatriated from the poorest area on earth amounted to 5% of its GDP vs 1% in public aid to development. In this context, it is legitimate to raise the question: who is helping who?

 

If we take into account the plundering of Africa’s natural resources by private corporations, the brain drain of African intellectuals, embezzlement of goods by the African ruling class, manipulations of transfer prices by private corporations and other misappropriations, we cannot but be aware that Africa has been drained dry.

 

EU relations with Africa illustrate the continuation of neocolonial policies. These have developed beyond the framework of the ACP Cotonou Agreements. [5] Nowadays, the EU has enforced other frameworks that are more significant in its relation with Africa such as an EU partnership framework for migration (the Valletta Action Plan with the Khartoum and Rabat processes), to which we should add the bilateral frameworks and agreements that European countries have with African countries or regions. Not forgetting the CFA currency for 15 African countries, soon to become the Eco for eight of them, without significant change of policy.

 

Many European citizens have no idea of the extent to which conditions and clauses imposed under such agreements are setting the ground for a new debt crisis in the developing countries. Some basic facts that are not known by most people are that whereas the total volume of aid received annually by Africa from Europe stands at around $21 billion, African migrants in Europe remit around $30 billion to their families in their home countries, almost 50% more than the amount of the European aid; or funds currently available from the European Investment Fund for the whole African continent that stand at $3.3 billion, which is equivalent to the cost of one mid-sized infrastructure project like a port. Furthermore, the new EU proposed budget for 2021-2027 plans to allocate more than $34.9 billion to various mechanisms of migration control. [6] It will end up costing Europe more to patrol its borders than what is allocated to Africa as development aid or what Africa is suffering from trade losses with Europe. The impact of these agreements on trade results is also remarkable. From 2003 to 2014, Africa always had a trade surplus with Europe, whereas since 2015, the trend has reversed amounting to close to a $30 billion deficit.

 

Latin America and the Caribbean

 

Table 3. Debt and resources devoted to repayment (in billions USD): Latin America and the Caribbean  [7]

 

External debt

Incl. public external debt

Debt stock in 1970

8

8

Debt stock in 2012

1200

492

Debt stock in 2017

1502

722

Repayment 1970 - 2012

2679

1547

Repayment 1970 - 2017

3707

1937

Sources:

Total external debt: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.TDS.DECT.CD

Public external debt and guarantee: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.TDS.DPPG.CD

 

Latin America has one of the highest negative external debt balances among developing continents for 1985-2017.

 

Table 4. Net transfers on external debt 1985 - 2017 (in billions of USD): Latin America and the Caribbean

 

Net transfers on external debt (in bn USD)

1985 - 2017

External debt

-14

Public external debt

-127

Sources:

Public external debt and guarantee: https://donnees.banquemondiale.org/indicateur/DT.NTR.DPPG.CD [data no longer available]

External debt: https://donnees.banquemondiale.org/indicateur/DT.NTR.DECT.CD?end=2017&start=2000 [data no longer available]

 

Impact of debt payment on the way public resources are used

Table 5. Distribution of expenditure in national budgets (as % of GDP and as % of the budget) in Latin America in 2013  [8]

  

% of GDP

 

% of the Budget

 

Public debt servicing

Public expenditure for education

Public expenditure for health care

Public debt servicing

Public expenditure for education

Public expenditure for health care

Argentina

9,6

1,8

1,0

38,4

7,3

4,0

Brazil

22,7

1,8

2,1

42,2

3,9

3,4

Columbia

6,3

3,5

1,6

24,3

13,4

6,2

Ecuador

3,7

7,1

3,1

8,3

15,9

6,8

 

If we take into account the evolution of public expenditure of some fifty low-income countries from 2015 to 2017, we notice an increase of expenditure related to debt repayment, a decrease of health-related expenditure and a stagnation in terms of education (see chart 1).

 

Chart 1 – Public expenditure in low-income countries for public debt servicing, education and health care [9] (as % of the GDP)

Source: UNCTAD secretariat calculations based on World Bank World Development Indicators data and International Monetary Fund DSA LIC country reports published between 2015 and 2018.

 

From 2015 to 2017 we also notice an increase in public expenditure related to debt repayment in Africa, South Asia and in general for Least developed countries (LDCs) (see chart 2).

 

Chart 2 – Expenditure of public debt servicing in Least developed countries countries in large regions (as % of the GDP)

Source: UNCTAD secretariat calculations based on International Monetary Fund DSA LIC country reports published between 2015 and 2018.
122 are actually in a critical debt situation

 

According to Milan Rivié https://www.cadtm.org/New-debt-crisis-in-the-South, who uses IMF information, in July 2019, among low income countries, nine were over indebted and 24 were on the brink of being over indebted, i.e. 39% of them. [10] As evidence of the inability (and the lack of determination) of international financial institutions (IFIs) to find an adequate and sustainable response to over indebtedness, half of those countries had strictly applied the adjustment policies of the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative launched by the G7, the World Bank and the IMF in 1996. And according to a German NGO, 122 are actually in a critical debt situation. [11]

 

It is possible not to repay an illegitimate debt

 

It is quite possible to resist creditors, as evidenced by Mexico under Benito Juárez, who in 1867 refused to repay loans contracted by emperor Maximilian from the Société Générale de Paris two years earlier in order to finance the occupation of Mexico by the French army. [12] In 1914, at the height of the revolution, when Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were victorious, Mexico completely suspended payment of its external debt, which was considered to be illegitimate; the Mexican government only repaid symbolic amounts from 1914 to 1942, just in order to pacify creditors. From 1934 to 1940, President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the railway and the oil industry without any compensation; he also expropriated over 18 million hectares of landed estates to give them over to indigenous communities. His tenacity paid: in 1942, creditors renounced about 90% of the debt value and said they were satisfied with limited compensations for the companies they had been evicted from. Mexico was able to undergo major social and economic development from the 1930s to the 1960s. Other countries such as Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador successfully suspended debt repayment from 1931. In the case of Brazil, selective suspension of repayment lasted until 1943, when an agreement made it possible to reduce debt by 30%.

 

More recently, in July 2007, in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa set up a committee to audit public debt. After fourteen months of work, its findings gave evidence that a large part of the country’s public debt was illegitimate and illegal. In November 2008, the government decided to unilaterally suspend repayment of debt securities sold on international financial markets and maturing in 2012 and 2030. Finally, the government of this small country won its case opposing North-American bankers who held those securities. It bought for USD 900 million securities that had been worth USD 3.2 billion. Through this operation Ecuador’s public Treasury saved about USD 7 bn on the borrowed capital and the remaining interests. It could then free resources to finance new social spending (as shown in table 5). Ecuador has not been targeted by international reprisals. [13]

 

It is obvious that refusing to repay illegitimate debt is a necessary measure, but it is not enough to generate development. A consistent development programme must be implemented. Financial resources have to be generated through increasing the State’s resources through taxes that respect social and environmental justice (Millet and Toussaint, 2018).

29 January 2020

 

(Translated by Snake Arbusto, Mike Krolikowski and Christine Pagnoulle)

 

- Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.

www.cadtm.org

 

Bibliography

  • Howse, R. (2007). The Concept of Odious Debt in Public International Law. UNCTAD Discussion Papers No. 185. New York, USA: United Nations
  • King, J. (2006). Odious Debt: The Terms of Debate, North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation, vol. 32 no. 4.
  • King, J. (2016). The Doctrine of Odious Debt in International Law. A Restatement, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lamarque, C., and Vivien, R. (2011). “Suspending public debt repayments by legal means” https://www.cadtm.org/Suspending-public-debt-repayments
  • Lienau, O. (2014). Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics Reputation and Legitimacy in Modern Finance, Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press.
  • Ludington, S., Gulati, M., & Brophy, A. (2009). Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debt, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 11 (1)
  • Michalowski, S. (2009). The Doctrine of Odious Debts in International Law in Mader, M., and Rothenbühler,A., (eds) How to Challenge Illegitimate Debt Theory and Legal Case Studies, Basel, Switzerland: Aktion Finanzplatz Schweiz.
  • Millet Damien and Toussaint Eric, “Once upon a time there was a popular government that wanted to do away with the export-oriented extractivist model”, https://www.cadtm.org/once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-popular-government-that-wanted-to-do-away-with-the
  • MILLIKAN, Max and ROSTOW, Walt Whitman. 1957. A Proposal: Keys to An Effective Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, p. 158.
  • REINHARDT Carmen et ROGOFF Kenneth, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton, 2009.
  • RIVIÉ, Milan, “New Debt Crisis in the South” https://www.cadtm.org/New-debt-crisis-in-the-South
  • ROSENSTEIN-RODAN, Paul. (1961). ‘International Aid for Underdeveloped Countries’, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol.43, p.107.
  • Roos, J. (2016). Why Not Default? The Structural Power of Finance in Sovereign Debt Crises, Thesis Introduction, European University Institute, Florence
  • SACK, A., N. (1927). Les Effets des Transformations des États sur leurs Dettes Publiques et Autres Obligations financières, Paris, France: Sirey.
  • SAMUELSON, Paul. 1980. Economics, 11th edition, McGraw Hill, New York, p. 617-618.
  • TOUSSAINT, Éric (2017), The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation, Haymarket, 2019

 

Footnotes

[1] See Éric TOUSSAINT, “Debt: how France appropriated Tunisia”, cadtm.org, 13 June 2016: https://www.cadtm.org/Debt-how-France-appropriated

[2] See Éric TOUSSAINT, “Debt as an instrument of the colonial conquest of Egypt”, cadtm.org, 6 June 2016: https://www.cadtm.org/Debt-as-an-instrument-of-the

[3] See Éric TOUSSAINT, “Newly Independent Greece had an Odious Debt round her Neck”, cadtm.org, 26 April 2016 : https://www.cadtm.org/Newly-Independent-Greece-had-an

[4] Middle-East and North Africa

[5] The ACP-EU Partnership Agreement, signed in Cotonou on 23 June 2000, was concluded for a 20-year period from 2000 to 2020. It is the most comprehensive partnership agreement between developing countries and the EU. Since 2000, it has been the framework for the EU’s relations with 79 countries from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP). In 2010, ACP-EU cooperation has been adapted to new challenges such as climate change, food security, regional integration, State fragility and aid effectiveness. See here: https://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/regions/african-caribbean-and-pacific-acp-region/cotonou-agreement_en

[6] “EU will spend more on border and migration control than on Africa”. Euractiv. 1st August 2018. See here: https://www.euractiv.com/section/africa/news/for-tomorrow-eu-will-spend-more-on-border-and-migration-control-than-on-africa/

[7] Repayments cover the total of depreciation and debt interests.

[8] Source: Data for Argentina at governmental level are provided by the Nation’s General budget for 2013: Ministry of economy and public finance, Nation’s Presidency (Argentina), Presupuesto 2013 Resumen, Buenos Aires, 2013, http://www.mecon.gov.ar/onp/html/presupresumen/resum13.pdf;

data for Brazil’s central government for 2014 are provided by the Citizens’ Audit of the Debt: Maria Lucia Fattorelli, “Dívida consumirá mais de um trilhão de reais em 2014”, Auditoria Cidadã da Dívida, http://www.auditoriacidada.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Artigo-Orcamento-2014.pdf;

data for Columbia are provided by the Nation’s General Budget for 2013: Ministerio de Hacienda y Crédito Público, República de Colombia, Presupesto general de la Nación, 2013, http://www.minhacienda.gov.co/presupuesto/index.html;

data for Ecuador by the Nation’s General Budget for 2012: Ministry of finance, national Government of the Republic of Ecuador, Presupuesto General del Estado, 2012, http://www.finanzas.gob.ec/el-presupuesto-general-del-estado.

[9] This applies to some fifty low-income countries.

[10] List of overindebted countries on 31 July 2019: Congo-Brazzaville, Gambia, Grenade, Mozambique, Sao Tomé and Principe, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Zimbabwe. List of the twenty-four countries with high risk of overindebtedness: Afghanistan, Burundi, Cameroon, Cap verde, Djibouti, Dominique, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Laos, Maldives, Mauritania, Micronesia, RCA, Samoa, Sierra Leone, St Vincent les Grenadines, Tajikistan, Chad, Tonga, Tuvalu and Zambia. See IMF, “List of LIC DSAs for PRGT-Eligible Countries. As of july 31, 2019”. Accessed on 15 August 2019. Available at https://www.imf.org/external/Pubs/ft/dsa/DSAlist.pdf and United Nations, Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2019. Available at https://developmentfinance.un.org/sites/developmentfinance.un.org/files/FSDR2019.pdf

[11] Jürgen Kaiser, “Global sovereign debt monitor”, Erlassjahr & Misereor, 2019, p.4. Available at https://erlassjahr.de/en/news/global-sovereign-debt-monitor-2019/

[12] See Éric TOUSSAINT, “Mexico proved that debt can be repudiated” 22 July 2017 https://www.cadtm.org/Mexico-proved-that-debt-can-be

[13] Eric Toussaint, Eleni Tsekeri, Pierre Carles, “Équateur : Historique de l’audit de la dette réalisée en 2007-2008. Pourquoi est-ce une victoire ?” (“Ecuador: History of the debt audit conducted in 2007-2008. Why is it a victory?”) (14-minute video, in French) https://www.cadtm.org/Equateur-Historique-de-l-audit-de

 

 

http://www.cadtm.org/Debt-Against-the-People-an-ABC

 

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