Despite many developing countries facing a very real risk of falling into debt crisis - the current options available to assist countries to manage their debts are surprisingly lacking.
For Jamaicans like Roxan Brown, the Caribbean nation's International Monetary Fund (IMF) successes don’t mean a thing. Seven consecutive tests have been passed but still, the mother of two can’t find work and relies instead on the kindness of friends and family.
The European Union should not be afraid of the leftist opposition party Syriza winning the Greek election, but see it as a chance to rediscover its founding principle - the social dimension that created it and without which it cannot survive.
Puerto Rican society has been shaken to its foundations by the announcement in February by Standard & Poor's and Moody's credit rating agencies that they had downgraded the island's creditworthiness to junk status.
On May 23, shortly after wrapping up negotiations on the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) 958- million-dollar loan - its second in three years - to keep Jamaica out of default, the fund’s mission chief in the country, Jan Kees Martijn, set out to visit Croydon, a former plantation settlement in the mountainous northwest of the island.
Anti-poverty campaigners are celebrating the Norwegian government’s release of an external audit of all outstanding public debts it is owed by developing countries, the first time any country has undertaken such a process.
The fate of countries with major debt problems is at stake in federal courts in New York, which are to decide in April whether or not they accept Argentina’s proposal to the bondholders who rejected two restructurings of sovereign debt.
Ignoring the thousands of protestors gathered outside the Greek parliament on Wednesday, the government voted in public spending cuts amounting to 17 billion dollars in an economy already on its knees from a lacerated budget.
Twelve years after a global campaign successfully advocated the cancellation of some of the world’s poorest countries’ public debt, developing economies are again facing unsustainable debt burdens. Only this time, it is the private sector’s debt in developing economies that is inflating dangerously.
The changing international political order and a dramatic budgetary situation at home are forcing France to consider giving up the extremely expensive nuclear arsenal the country has maintained since the late 1950s.