The mixed economy of Sri Lanka was worth $84 billion by nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 and $296.959 billion by purchasing power parity (PPP). The country had experienced an annual growth of 6.4 percent from 2003 to 2012, well above its regional peers. This growth was driven by the growth of non-tradable sectors, which the World Bank warned to be both unsustainable and unequitable. Growth has slowed since then. In 2019 with an income per capita of 13,620 PPP Dollars or 3,852 (2019) nominal US dollars, Sri Lanka was re-classified as a lower middle income nation with the population around 22 million (2021) by the World Bank from a previous upper middle income status.
The debt of developing countries usually refers to the external debt incurred by governments of developing countries.
Kenneth Saul Rogoff is an American economist and chess Grandmaster.
The Argentine debt restructuring is a process of debt restructuring by Argentina that began on January 14, 2005, and allowed it to resume payment on 76% of the US$82 billion in sovereign bonds that defaulted in 2001 at the depth of the worst economic crisis in the nation's history. A second debt restructuring in 2010 brought the percentage of bonds under some form of repayment to 93%, though ongoing disputes with holdouts remained. Bondholders who participated in the restructuring settled for repayments of around 30% of face value and deferred payment terms, and began to be paid punctually; the value of their nearly worthless bonds also began to rise. The remaining 7% of bondholders were later repaid 25% less than they were demanding, after centre-right and US-aligned leader Mauricio Macri came to power in 2015.
In economics, the debt-to-GDP ratio is the ratio between a country's government debt and its gross domestic product (GDP). A low debt-to-GDP ratio indicates that an economy produces goods and services sufficient to pay back debts without incurring further debt. Geopolitical and economic considerations – including interest rates, war, recessions, and other variables – influence the borrowing practices of a nation and the choice to incur further debt.
A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and many recessions coincided with these panics. Other situations that are often called financial crises include stock market crashes and the bursting of other financial bubbles, currency crises, and sovereign defaults. Financial crises directly result in a loss of paper wealth but do not necessarily result in significant changes in the real economy.
Financial repression comprises "policies that result in savers earning returns below the rate of inflation" to allow banks to "provide cheap loans to companies and governments, reducing the burden of repayments." It can be particularly effective at liquidating government debt denominated in domestic currency. It can also lead to large expansions in debt "to levels evoking comparisons with the excesses that generated Japan’s lost decade and the 1997 Asian financial crisis."
A sovereign default is the failure or refusal of the government of a sovereign state to pay back its debt in full when due. Cessation of due payments may either be accompanied by that government's formal declaration that it will not pay its debts (repudiation), or it may be unannounced. A credit rating agency will take into account in its gradings capital, interest, extraneous and procedural defaults, and failures to abide by the terms of bonds or other debt instruments.
Carmen M. Reinhart is a Cuban-American economist and the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a member of American Economic Association, Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, and the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. She became the subject of general news coverage when mathematical errors were found in a research paper she co-authored.
Original sin is a term in economics literature, proposed by Barry Eichengreen, Ricardo Hausmann, and Ugo Panizza in a series of papers to refer to a situation in which "most countries are not able to borrow abroad in their domestic currency."
The default traps in sovereign borrowing refers to the idea that once a country falls into a default, it is more likely to default again in the future, compared to another country with identical future output ability. The idea of default traps is related with the asymmetric information between the borrower and the lender about the expectation of borrower's future output (GDP), the negative output shocks that increase the borrower's future default probability and other possible factors like political shocks.
Debt crisis is a situation in which a government loses the ability of paying back its governmental debt. When the expenditures of a government are more than its tax revenues for a prolonged period, the government may enter into a debt crisis. Various forms of governments finance their expenditures primarily by raising money through taxation. When tax revenues are insufficient, the government can make up the difference by issuing debt.
Debt intolerance is a term referring to the inability of emerging markets to manage levels of external debt that, under the same circumstances, would be manageable for developed countries, making a direct analogy to lactose-intolerant individuals. It was coined by Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff and Miguel Savastano.
Growth in a Time of Debt, also known by its authors' names as Reinhart–Rogoff, is an economics paper by American economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published in a non peer-reviewed issue of the American Economic Review in 2010. Politicians, commentators, and activists widely cited the paper in political debates over the effectiveness of austerity in fiscal policy for debt-burdened economies. The paper argues that when "gross external debt reaches 60 percent of GDP", a country's annual growth declined by two percent, and "for levels of external debt in excess of 90 percent" GDP growth was "roughly cut in half." Appearing in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the evidence for the 90%-debt threshold hypothesis provided support for pro-austerity policies.
Debt-trap diplomacy is a term to describe an international financial relationship where a creditor country or institution extends debt to a borrowing nation partially, or solely, to increase the lender's political leverage. The creditor country is said to extend excessive credit to a debtor country with the intention of extracting economic or political concessions when the debtor country becomes unable to meet its repayment obligations. The conditions of the loans are often not publicized. The borrowed money commonly pays for contractors and materials sourced from the creditor country.
The Sri Lankan economic crisis is an ongoing crisis in Sri Lanka that started in 2019. It is the country's worst economic crisis since its independence in 1948. It has led to unprecedented levels of inflation, near-depletion of foreign exchange reserves, shortages of medical supplies, and an increase in prices of basic commodities. The crisis is said to have begun due to multiple compounding factors like tax cuts, money creation, a nationwide policy to shift to organic or biological farming, the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka. The subsequent economic hardships resulted in the 2022 Sri Lankan protests. Sri Lanka received a lifeline in the form of an Indian line of credit amounting to $4 billion. This substantial credit infusion served to cover the costs of importing essential goods and fuel. As a result, the foreign currency reserves of debt-ridden Sri Lanka experienced a notable improvement, reaching $2.69 billion.
Sri Lanka declared the country was suspending payment on most foreign debt from April 12, 2022, kindling the Indian Ocean island's first sovereign default event and ending an unblemished record of repaying external debt despite experiencing milder currency crises in the past. By April Sri Lanka was suffering the worst monetary crisis in its history with a steeply falling rupee, high inflation and forex shortages which triggered shortfalls of fuel, power and medicine. Widespread public protests led to a political crisis. In March, the International Monetary Fund released a report saying publicly for the first time that the country's debt was unsustainable and required re-structuring. Authorities had advertised for financial and legal advisors to help negotiate with creditors shortly before the suspension was announced.
Sri Lanka joined the International Monetary Fund on August 29, 1950. Since June 1965, Sri Lanka has taken 16 loans from the IMF, with a total value of 3,586,000,000 SDR's. The most recent of these loans was agreed to in June 2016, with an agreed total of 1,070,780 SDR's, and 715,230,000 SDR's being withdrawn. Of this total, 715,230,000 SDR's remain outstanding. Notwithstanding the receipt of substantial soft loans from China, the island nation of Sri Lanka finds itself ensnared in a foreign currency crisis, prompting concerns among experts that it may be driven towards default. The current year places a heavy burden on Sri Lanka, with debt repayments amounting to approximately $4.5 billion, commencing with an initial payment of $500 million towards an international sovereign bond. It is worth noting that Sri Lanka holds a position of significant importance in China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.
