The Sovereign Debt Challange: An Overview

Recent years have seen profound changes in country risk and its components, in the context of crises multiplication and diversification; the sovereign risk, a main country risk component, has undergone important changes, mainly given by mutations in its determining factors; the economy of \"indebtedness\" represents a reality of the recent years. In this context, our paper aims to capture new issues related to sovereign risk and its manifestations, and to bring to the fore a number of relevant indicators concerning the indebtedness problems. Currently, the increasing sovereign obligations, the Greece 2010 episode and the real sovereign debt crisis testify the important implications that the national economic policy decisions have on entire nations. In general, the countries with servicing difficulties present a total external or public debt that overcomes the average of the emerging states; however, we can not accurately identify a threshold beyond which we can say that a state is overly indebted. Therefore, questions such as "Starting from what point is a state overly indebted?" or "What is the cause of the excessive debts of a state?" are fully justified and the answer or answers deserve being sought. Studies on the relationship between various economic variables and the countries ability to deal with external debt problems are present in the country risk literature since the 1970s; beginning with authors such as Frank and Cline (1971), which gave priority to external debt service indicators such as Exports, Imports / GDP, Imports / Reserves, and continuing with other specialists, among whom we mention Saini and Bates (1978), Abassi and Tafler (1982), Haque, Brewer and Rivoli (1990), North (2001) Bouchet (2003), Meunier (2005), Longueville (2010) and many others, many ratios and indicators were carefully analyzed. In our short study, we also present a number of recent aspects concerning sovereign risk, and we analyze some relevant indicators, using statistical data, for four countries: Romania, Greece, Hungary and Bulgaria. We underline the fact that, even if sovereign risk indicators are in the good intervals, the crisis risk remains present, especially because of the liquidity issues. For us, this brief paper opens the way for a much broader study, which aims to develop a model of sovereign risk analysis, the dependent variable, the probability of default, being explained by the evolution of the selected relevant indicators.