Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Pleading for Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Economic Sense

Kunibert Raffer ()

Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium, 2016, vol. 6, issue 3, 243-262

Abstract: Reviewing and commenting on Lienau’s book Rethinking Sovereign Debt, Politics, Reputation, and Legitimacy, this paper agrees with most of her points, aiming at supporting and complementing rather than contradicting her line of argument. It wants to corroborate her points as well as to bring up aspects that the book does not discuss. It presents two main comments on the more civilized treatment of sovereign debtors before WWII, and on the role of the Bretton Woods Institutions after 1945 that – as Lienau correctly notes – changed the positon of debtors fundamentally. The paper shows that going further back into history than the book did, namely sovereign debts in the nineteenth century, strongly corroborates Lienau’s line of argument regarding the period before WWII. The paper complements the role of the Bretton Woods Institutions with further facts, arguing that their strongly statist view is also self-serving and helpful to support multilateral lending practices violating these institutions’ statutes. Finally, the new tendency back to a non-statist regime she rightly observes is commented on, pointing out that present debt management in the eurozone constitutes a considerable backlash.

Keywords: insolvency; sovereign debt restructuring; international finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ael-2015-0015 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:aelcon:v:6:y:2016:i:3:p:243-262:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ael/html

DOI: 10.1515/ael-2015-0015

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium is currently edited by Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yuri Biondi and Shyam Sunder

More articles in Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().