External debt

External debt (or foreign debt) is the total debt a country owes to foreign creditors, complemented by internal debt owed to domestic lenders. The debtors can be the government, corporations or citizens of that country. The debt includes money owed to private commercial banks, other governments, or international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Note that the use of gross liability figures greatly distorts the ratio for countries which contain major money centers such as the United Kingdom due to London's role as a financial capital. Contrast with net international investment position.

According to the International Monetary Fund, "Gross external debt is the amount, at any given time, of disbursed and outstanding contractual liabilities of residents of a country to nonresidents to repay principal, with or without interest, or to pay interest, with or without principal".

In this definition, the IMF defines the key elements as follows:

Generally, external debt is classified into four heads:

However, the exact treatment varies from country to country. For example, while Egypt maintains this four-head classification, in India it is classified in seven heads:

Sustainable debt is the level of debt which allows a debtor country to meet its current and future debt service obligations in full, without recourse to further debt relief or rescheduling, avoiding accumulation of arrears, while allowing an acceptable level of economic growth.

External-debt-sustainability analysis is generally conducted in the context of medium-term scenarios. These scenarios are numerical evaluations that take account of expectations of the behavior of economic variables and other factors to determine the conditions under which debt and other indicators would stabilize at reasonable levels, the major risks to the economy, and the need and scope for policy adjustment. In these analyses, macroeconomic uncertainties, such as the outlook for the current account, and policy uncertainties, such as for fiscal policy, tend to dominate the medium-term outlook.

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