In 1988, the prices on the secondary market of LDC debt averaged 50 cents per dollar of face value. From the observation of such discount, this paper goes one step further and argues thatthe debt should be written down in order to account for the discrepancy between the face and market value of...

In considering how the euro will affect Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors examine the transmission channels through which the euro could affect economies in the region. They examine the risks and opportunities the euro presents for Sub-Saharan African countries. They especially examine the effects...

A large gap may lie between the amount of debt relief that is nominally granted to a debtor and that which is actually given up by the creditors. To help put that gap in perspective, the author proposes a valuation formula that provides: (i) the price at which a buy-back of the debt, on the...

This report compares and identifies two ways that Governments can"up-front"the adjustment effort: accumulating reserves; and engaging in an equity swap. The authors compare these methods with a constant rescheduling agreement which assumes that no reserves can be accumulated and that tax...

We analyze a two-country zone facing a joint inflationary shock and responding with coordinated and uncoordinated monetary and fiscal policies. We show that the standard presumption that the absence of coordination results in an excessive exchange rate appreciation of the zone with respect to...

I argue in this paper that the `speed of convergence' estimated in recent works on `convergence' does not capture `actual' convergence towards a steady state, but rather conditional dynamics towards a moving target. Although this conditional convergence can be taken to imply that there are...

This paper analyzes econometrically how a country`s post-crisis debt ratio could be forecast, in the aftermath of a debt crisis, from the previous debt-to-GDP ratio. A critical parameter is simply the debt-to-PPP-GDP ratio, where PPP-GDP is, in current international dollars, the Summers-Heston...