External debt in developing economies: assessment and policy issues

Fiscal policy in debt constrained economies

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE’s government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing ...

Deficits, Debt Financing, Monetary Policy and Inflation in Developing Countries: Internal or External Factors? Evidence from Iran

This paper focuses on internal and external factors, which influence the inflation rate in developing countries. A monetary model of inflation rate, capable of incorporating both monetary and fiscal policies as well as other internal and external factors, was developed and tested on Iranian data. It was found that, over the long run, a higher exchange rate leads to a higher price and that the f...

Optimal Fiscal Policy in Debt Constrained Economies∗

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign default risk. The SOE’s government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing the standard...

Debt, Deficits, and Destabilizing Monetary Policy in Open Economies

Blanchard (2005) suggested that active interest rate policy might induce unstable dynamics in highly-indebted economies. We examine this in a dynamic general equilibrium model where Calvo-type price rigidities provide a rationale for inflation stabilization. Unstable dynamics can occur when the CB is aggressively raising the interest rate in response to higher expected inflation. The constraint...

Defense Expenditures, External Public Debt and Growth in Developing Countries