Tackling Private Over-Indebtedness in Asia: Economic and Legal Aspects

Jose Garrido, Sanaa Nadeem, Nagwa Riad, Anjum Rosha, Chanda DeLong and Nadia Rendak

No 2020/172, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: One consequence of interest rates remaining “too low for too long” since the Global Financial Crisis is the buildup in private leverage in emerging economies. These vulnerabilities have been laid bare by the COVID-19 shock. This paper employs the growth at risk framework (Adrian, Boyarchenko, and Giannone, 2019) to examine how different types of private leverage present risks to future GDP growth in Asian economies. We find evidence that private leverage can boost GDP growth in the near term, but can increase the risks of low growth over the medium term. For our sample, we also find that household debt poses a larger drag on future GDP growth than corporate debt. In the second part of the paper, we provide an overview of a strategy for prevention and resolution of over-indebtedness, with a focus on legal tools, and with considerations to account for the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a novel cross-country survey, we examine the role of legal techniques to prevent and treat corporate and household over-indebtedness, benchmarking those in ASEAN-5, China, India, Japan and Korea against international best practice. The analysis can inform a country-specific prioritized approach to strengthening legal frameworks.

Keywords: WP; household debt; legal system; debt enforcement; enterprise debt; restructuring mechanism; resource allocation; reorganization procedure; debt restructuring; disposable income; repayment plan; enterprise liability; a number of debt-restructuring option; Solvency; Debt restructuring; Legal support in revenue administration; Corporate insolvency; Credit; Global; Private debt; corporate debt; legal frameworks; insolvency; household debt expansion; Asia and Pacific (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37
Date: 2020-08-28
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=49704 (application/pdf)

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:imf:imfwpa:2020/172

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().