It is very well known that growth rates play a role in debt dynamics. Despite this widespread knowledge real world narratives of public debt crises often focus almost exclusively on budget deficits and neglect the role of growth. This paper presents the simplest arithmetic possible to illustrate how ...

Public debts in the advanced economies have surged in recent years to levels that have not been recorded since the end of World War II. Through 2010 the average public debt/GDP ratio for all the advanced economies has surpassed the pre-World War II peaks reached during the World War I and subsequently ...

In standard macroeconomics, fiscal policy involves choices about expenditures, taxes, and debt issue. The different kinds of public spending may be distinguished with respect to their interactions with private decisions. For example, some public activities influence private production and some interact ...

For a Chilean capital market participant, it may be hard to imagine a world without the indexation unit, the Unidad de Fomento (UF). Most market participants would probably agree that the UF played a central role in the creation of a local capital market and also that it has had a positive impact on ...

Since the implementation of the Real Plan of 1994, the Brazilian economy has been in the process of reducing its degree of indexation. For more than three decades, Brazilian wages, rents, financial securities, and other contracts were indexed to the price level. The frequency of adjustment sometimes ...