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How Governments Borrow reveals how annual borrowing decisions are informed by domestic politics. The book traces the annual fiscal policymaking process in Emerging Markets (EM) to show how a government's partisan policy preferences are a primary determinant of annual external borrowing decisions and thus patterns of debt accumulation.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Partisan Politics and Constrained Institutions: A Model of Sovereign Debt Accumulation in Emerging Markets
- 3: Testing the Partisan Model
- 4: South Africa and Botswana
- 5: Peru
- 6: Thailand
- 7: Conclusion
- References
- Appendix
About the author
Ben Cormier is a Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde School of Government and Public Policy. He works on the international political economy of finance and development, interested in sovereign debt, financial markets, capital flows, aid flows, loan conditions, government transparency, and international organizations.
Summary
How Governments Borrow reveals how annual borrowing decisions are informed by domestic politics. The book traces the annual fiscal policymaking process in Emerging Markets (EM) to show how a government's partisan policy preferences are a primary determinant of annual external borrowing decisions and thus patterns of debt accumulation.
Additional text
The book is clear and compelling, with a wealth of evidence that highlights the fundamentally political nature of sovereign debt, explaining how political choices over fiscal policy shape borrowing and the composition of outstanding debt. Especially welcome is the careful attention to the bureaucratic processes and politics of debt issuance. Cormier has offered a straightforward but counterintuitive account of how politics explain emerging markets' engagement with international finance, paving the way for more research that takes seriously the preferences and agency of borrowing countries.
