Dealing with Debt

Carmen Reinhart, Vincent Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff

Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: This paper explores the menu of options for renormalizing public debt levels relative to nominal activity in the long run, should governments eventually decide to do so. Orthodox ones for medium-term debt stabilization, the standard fare of officialdom, include enhancing growth, running primary budget surpluses, and privatizing government assets. Heterodox polices include restructuring debt contracts, generating unexpected inflation, taxing wealth, and repressing private finance. We examine 70 episodes across 22 advanced economies from 1800 to 2014 where there were significant and sustained reductions in public debt relative to nominal GDP. In the event, advanced countries have relied far more on heterodox approaches than many observers choose to remember.

JEL-codes: E43 H63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

Downloads: (external link)
https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=1154

Related works:
Journal Article: Dealing with debt (2015)
Working Paper: Dealing with debt (2015)
Chapter: Dealing with Debt (2014)
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:ecl:harjfk:rwp15-009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().