IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2017-220.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Debt Sustainability Analyses for Low-Income Countries: An Assessment of Projection Performance

Author

Listed:
  • Mr. Henry Mooney
  • Constance de Soyres

Abstract

This paper develops new error assessment methods to evaluate the performance of debt sustainability analyses (DSAs) for low-income countries (LICs) from 2005-2015. We find some evidence of a bias towards optimism for public and external debt projections, which was most appreciable for LICs with the highest incomes, prospects for market access, and at ‘moderate’ risk of debt distress. This was often driven by overly-ambitious fiscal and/or growth forecasts, and projected ‘residuals’. When we control for unanticipated shocks, we find that biases remain evident, driven in part by optimism regarding government fiscal reaction functions and expected growth dividends from investment.

Suggested Citation

  • Mr. Henry Mooney & Constance de Soyres, 2017. "Debt Sustainability Analyses for Low-Income Countries: An Assessment of Projection Performance," IMF Working Papers 2017/220, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2017/220
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=45333
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael Atingi-Ego & Sayed Timuno & Tiviniton Makuve, 2021. "Public Debt Accumulation in SSA: A Looming Debt Crisis [‘Government Ponzi Games and the Sustainability of Public Deficits Under Uncertainty’]," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 30(Supplemen), pages 103-139.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2017/220. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.