Developing Country Debt and Globalisation

This chapter considers the relationship between developing country external debt and the integration of world markets in the 1980s and 1990s (‘globalisation’). Governments, companies, other institutions, and individuals contract debt, and it is a major confusion to refer to the debt of ‘countries’. Perhaps the defining characteristic of an external debt is that the contracting party is not, in general, the party upon whom the burden for repayment falls. In general, governments and the wealthy in developing countries contract the debt, while it is the mass of the non-wealthy population that bears the burden of its repayment