S. Ali Abbas is currently serving as Advisor in the Middle East and Central Asia Department, heading the International Monetary Fund team for Jordan. Prior to this, he was Deputy Chief of the Debt Policy Division in the Strategy and Policy Review Department of the IMF. He has led key reforms to the Fund's lending and crisis resolution frameworks; served as Fund liaison to the Paris Club; and has been closely involved in several exceptional access Fund-supported programs, including Ireland 2010, Ukraine 2015, and Argentina 2018. He has published on fiscal policy, government financing, and sovereign debt crises, and helped compile widely-used databases on the level, dynamics, and composition of public debt.
Alex Pienkowski is an economist in the European department of the International Monetary Fund with a focus on sovereign debt, in particular the resolution architecture for debt crises, the costs and benefits of state-contingent debt and the propagation of shocks during crises. He has worked on a range of countries including Portugal, Argentina, Ukraine and Mongolia. Prior to the IMF, Alex worked for the Bank of England for five years. He specialized in international issues in both the financial stability and monetary analysis departments of the Bank. Much of his time involved working on the euro area sovereign debt crisis. Alex was also an Overseas Development Institute fellow in Malawi between 2007-09.
Kenneth Rogoff is Thomas D. Cabot Professor at Harvard University. From 2001-2003, Rogoff served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. His widely-citedbook with Carmen Reinhart This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly shows the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the run-up and the aftermath of severe financial crises. Rogoff is also known for his seminal work on exchange rates and on central bank independence. He is also the author of Foundations of International Macroeconomics and The Curse of Cash, and his syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries. Rogoff is among the top ten world ranked economists by scholarly citations.

• Introduction


• 1: Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Pedro Esteves and Kris James Mitchener: Public Debt through the Ages


• 2: Serkan Arslanalp, Wolfgang Bergthaler, Philip Stokoe and Alexander F. Tieman: Guide to Sovereign Debt Definitions and Composition


• 3: Antonio Fatás, Atish R. Ghosh, Ugo Panizza, Andrea F. Presbitero: The Motive to Borrow


• 4: Xavier Debrun, Jonathan D. Ostry, Tim Willems, and Charles Wyplosz: Public Debt Sustainability


• 5: Thordur Jonasson, Michael G. Papaioannou, and Mike Williams: Debt Management


• 6: Tom Best, Oliver Bush, Luc Eyraud, and M. Belen Sbrancia: Reducing Debt Short of Default


• 7: Julianne Ams , Reza Baqir , Anna Gelpern and Christoph Trebesch: Sovereign Default


• 8: Lee Buchheit, Guillaume Chabert, Chanda DeLong, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer: The Restructuring Process


• 9: Hugh Bredenkamp, Ricardo Hausmann , Alex Pienkowski, and Carmen Reinhart: Challenges Ahead

This book is an attempt to build some structure around the issues of sovereign debt to help guide economists, practitioners, and policymakers through this complicated, but not intractable, subject.