Coordinating Public Debt Management With Fiscal And Monetary Policies An Analytical Framework

This paper proposes a sovereign asset and liability management framework for analyzing the inter-relationships between debt management, fiscal and monetary policies. It illustrates the consequences of uncoordinated policy mix and extends Sargent and Wallace (1981 and 1993) by including debt management. Examples of policy games played by fiscal, monetary, and debt management authorities reinforce the importance of policy separation and coordination to prevent domination by one authority over another which could lead to inconsistent policy mix.

Edited by V. Sundararajan, Peter Dattels, and Hans Blommestein, this volume outlines strategies for managing public debt, developing government securities markets, and coordinating those activities with monetary management through legal, administrative, and operational arrangements. Both transition and market economies are surveyed. The analysis draws partly on the literature on the microstructure of markets and auction systems and on selected country experiences.

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High-quality public debt management plays a critical role in reducing the vulnerability of developing countries to financial crises. With sound risk and cash management, effective coordination with fiscal and monetary policy, good governance, and adequate institutional and staff capacity in place, governments can develop and implement effective medium-term debt management strategies. Managing Public Debt: From Diagnostics to Reform Implementation draws insights from a joint pilot program set up by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to design relevant reform and capacity-building programs in twelve countries. The experiences of these geographically and economically diverse countries - Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Zambia - illustrate the challenges and elements necessary to make progress in the area of public debt management. Managing Public Debt will serve government officials contemplating or in the process of reforming their practices, providers of technical assistance, and practitioners working on building capacity in public debt management. Because effective implementation of debt management strategies also requires a developed domestic government debt market, readers will also be interested in the companion volume, Developing the Domestic Government Debt Market, published by The World Bank in February 2007, based on the same joint pilot program.

The paper analyzes the interplay between public debt and monetary management during financial reforms, and provides suggestions on collaboration between the central bank and the treasury to achieve common objectives. It discusses monetary policy and public debt at the onset and through different phases of a financial reform and emphasizes that many objectives of public debt and monetary management are mutually supportive. It recommends the setting up of units to deal with public debt issues both at the treasury and the central bank, as well as a committee to coordinate public debt and monetary management.

Sustainable public debt has gained renewed attention as countries implement fiscal consolidation measures in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Sound public debt policies and debt management practices require robust legal underpinnings. Complex legal issues however arise in the design of the legal framework, and tradeoffs are required in many instances. This paper analyzes key features of modern public debt management legal frameworks, drawing from examples in advanced, emerging, and frontier markets. It aims to provide guidance for countries that seek to review and strengthen their public debt management legal frameworks.

Recently, monetary authorities have increasingly focused on implementing policies to ensure price stability and strengthen central bank independence. Simultaneously, in the fiscal area, market development has allowed public debt managers to focus more on cost minimization. This “divorce” of monetary and debt management functions in no way lessens the need for effective coordination of monetary and fiscal policy if overall economic performance is to be optimized and maintained in the long term. This paper analyzes these issues based on a review of the relevant literature and of country experiences from an institutional and operational perspective.

As Europe proceeds towards economic and monetary union, fiscal convergence and the prospect of a common money are at the centre of discussion. This volume from the Centre for Economic Policy Research brings together theoretical, applied and historical research on the management of public debt and its implications for financial stability. Gale fills a gap in the literature, using a consistent framework to investigate the welfare economics of public debt, while Calvo and Guidotti analyse the trade-off between indexation and maturity when it comes to minimizing debt service. Confidence crises have become relevant again in view of the high debt ratios in countries such as Belgium, Italy and Ireland. Alesina, Prati and Tabellini develop a formal model of the propagation of a debt run and use it to interpret Italian debt panics. Giavazzi and Pagano concentrate on how inappropriate debt management can precipitate a run on the currency while Makinen and Woodward review a broad sweep of historical experience.

This medium-term debt management strategy paper discusses the assessment of recent capacity building. The effective debt management and hence the design and implementation of a debt management strategy depend on the macroeconomic and institutional context, but the connection is two-way: sound debt management is critical to macro and financial stability, and financial and overall development. Within the constraints of the macroeconomic framework, the debt manager has the delicate task of balancing domestic and external sources of financing of various tenors to meet the government funding needs at low over-all cost and contained risk. Sound debt management contributes to reduced macro-financial risks, complementing prudent fiscal management and monetary policy implementation. Debt management contributes to market and institutional development. The debt manager’s ability to cover external public financing requirements through external debt issuance and avoid undue bunching of debt service obligations helps reduce crowding out, exchange rate pressures, or large swings in international reserves.

Despite its beneficial aspects, public debt can be hazardous for macroeconomic performance should it reach unrepayable levels as a consequence of snowballing explosive trends. Failure to monitor the existing trend in public debt in order to detect such divergences from the stable path, and the lack of an adaptive public financial management can potentially culminate in a public debt crisis whose disruptive economic impacts can permeate all sectors of the economy very swiftly. However, public debt sustainability is a vague concept with no straightforward operational definitions. In addition, its multi-faceted nature is an impediment for the implementation of real-world appraisal of the fiscal posture from a stability viewpoint. As such, quantifying the public debt sustainability is essential for overhauling the fiscal policies so as to avoid a potential debt crisis stemming from malfunctioning fiscal policies. This book provides the reader with a practical and straightforward framework that outlines a tool for undertaking public debt sustainability analysis. In order to guide further empirical investigations, the discussion in this book is underpinned by a real-world application of the model which highlights the practical aspects of the tool with reference to time-varying empirical evidence from a developing country.