What lessons can we learn from 200 years of public debt?

Apr 4, 2019

Debt has a long and varied history. Image: REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi

Barry Eichengreen

Professor of Economics and Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Asmaa El-Ganainy

Deputy Division Chief, Institute for Capacity Development (European and Middle Eastern Division), IMF

Rui Esteves

Associate Professor of International History, Graduate Institute Geneva

Kris James Mitchener

Professor, Santa Clara University

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Social Protection is affecting economies, industries and global issues

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Social Protection

Have you read?

Notes: countries in default refers to the number of independent nations in default in a given year over the total number of independent nations. Incidence refers to the unconditional probability of new defaults p. a. Image: Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) and authors’ calculations

Notes: G-20 advanced countries included are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the U.K. and the U.S. Image: Abbas et al. (2014a)

Notes: G20 advanced economies included are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. PPP-GDP weighted averages. Image: Abbas et al. (2014b)

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.