RESOURCES ON ETHICS AND DEBT
Ethical and Practical Desirability of Existing Proposals
for Dealing with Debt
How should sovereign debt negotiations be
structured so that we can help to prevent countries from falling into financial
crises and indebtedness, and to enable those that do to escape more easily
without imposing unacceptable costs on other parties? The different actors
involved in international lending—creditor and borrowing governments, private
market lenders, and multilateral banks—differ sharply in their diagnoses of the
causes of severe debt, the agents who are primarily responsible for bringing it
about, and the extent to which remedying this problem will require deep reforms
to the global financial system. Yet each of these actors has advanced its own
concrete proposals that, they argue, can improve the fairness of processes for
dealing with sovereign debt.
Our resources in this area seek to illuminate the value disagreements and resulting conflicting priorities among actors that underlie the debate about what specific policies would constitute fairness in international lending.
Dealing Justly with Debt Roundtable
Introduction
Christian Barry
Resolving International Debt
Crises Fairly
Ann Pettifor
Reviving Troubled
Economies
Jack Boorman
The Constructive Role of Private
Creditors
Arturo Porzecanski
Sovereign Debt Restructuring
Proposals:
A Comparative Look
Thomas I. Palley
Feasible Additional Sources of Financing for Development
(Report)
Even in the cases for which political actors agree on the
ethical and practical necessity not to demand the repayment of debts, many are
concerned that halting repayment of debt would deplete the resources of
international financial institutions and thus undermine their capacity to
maintain stability in the global economy. This report presents specific
proposals for financing policies that are necessary for development, including
debt, while avoiding this danger.
The Justice of the International Financial System: Rules
and Institutions for Dealing with Debt
In order to identify
correctly the causes of sovereign indebtedness, it is necessary to consider the
systemic context in which international lending and borrowing decisions are
made. Why is it practically permissible to lend to rulers and regimes that are
widely recognized as dictatorial, such as Saddam Hussein, Mobutu Sese Seko,
South Africa’s apartheid government, or Argentina’s military junta, and then
demand that people repay these debts? What are the consequences for debt of the
ways in which international financial institutions—the IMF, World Bank, regional
multilateral banks—are set up and operate?
Our resources in this area seek to advance understanding on such questions and to propose feasible reforms that can justly and effectively eliminate structural and institutional reasons in the global economy that result in unjust lending practices.
Developing
Just Monetary Arrangements
Sanjay G. Reddy
Achieving
Democracy
Thomas Pogge
Holding
Intergovernmental Institutions to Account
Ngaire Woods
International
Financial Institutions and Financial Accountability
Kunibert
Raffer
Assistance
with Fewer Strings Attached
Vivien Collingwood
Work in Progress
Sovereign
Debt as an Ethical Problem:
Some Preliminary Considerations
Christian Barry
Also available in Portuguese:
A
dívida soberana como roblema ético: algumas considerações preliminares
This note proceeds in five stages: (1) it tries to clarify what sovereign debt is, and the different ethical statuses that sovereign debts can have; (2) it briefly describes some of the main features of the present rules governing sovereign debt—including the background norm of pacta sunt servanda; (3) it describes a picture of creditor/debtor relations—which is referred to as the ‘ideal picture’—that seems to lie behind and offer support for present practices and norms; (4) it argues that the ideal picture is so far removed from the actual nature of creditor/debtor relations that it provides very little support for present practices; finally, (5) it tries to identify some principles that seem more adequate to evaluating sovereign debt given the real circumstances of sovereigns debtors and creditors, and the modifications of present practices that such principles would very likely demand.
