ABSTRACT
The period since 1980 has seen more renegotiation and rescheduling of sovereign external debt than the entire amount ever renegotiated. A substantial number of cases were handled, overwhelmingly of small, weak African economies with external debt levels which while crippling in terms of service cost to the debtor were an almost trivial proportion of the outstanding credits of banks and governments concerned on the creditor side. The fact of needing to reschedule was strong presumptive evidence either of external debt or other economic mismanagement and/or of a severe terms of trade or natural disaster shock. The 1980-85 results of the case by case, creditor financial concerns centred, limited concessions debt renegotiation model are mixed. Like the sovereign external debt renegotiation model, this one assumes that countries with severe imbalances are in a minority and that their imbalances result largely from clearly identifiable and readily reversible macroeconomic policy errors.
