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Abstract

History provides many insights to address the issue of sovereign debt defaults. This article first presents a detailed account of defaults in historical perspective. It then discusses the solutions devised in the past to address sovereign debt crises and puts these into perspective with today’s answers when crises occur. Finally, the paper stresses the role of history when the events studied do not occur frequently and when archival data may shed new light on the process of the resolution of crises. The impact of odious debts declarations, of state succession, and of international relations on sovereign defaults and on their settlement is thus also addressed.
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... Second, we place the ongoing lending boom from China in historical perspective, in the tradition of many previous papers on sovereign debt and default that draw lessons from the past (see Eichengreen, 1991;Reinhart and Rogoff, 2009;Oosterlinck, 2013;Mitchener and Trebesch, 2020). In particular, we draw parallels to the syndicated bank lending boom of the 1970s, which ended in dozens of sovereign defaults in developing countries in the 1980s. ...
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