foreign debt: causes and measures taken

Abstract

In an increasingly globalized world, any crisis, including the ones caused by the foreign debtdefault of a country, may have a negative impact which can be contagious both at regional and atglobal level. Taking into account all the risks to which international creditors were subjectedover time, thestock of foreign debt worldwide has experienced a significant increase in the current millennium,actually demonstrating that international lending is profitable. The causes of default, the measures taken by the concerned countries to get out of this situationand the specific examples were the elements which I have tried to capture in this paper. Last butnot least, I have performed an analysis of the evolution of the foreign debt stock and the repaymentcapacity of small and medium-income countries, respectively the most vulnerable countries interms of debt repayment.