Coping with Disasters
Official ending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. This paper assembles the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official international loans, covering 230,000 loans, grants and guarantees extended by governments, central banks, and multilateral institutions in the period 1790–2015. Historically, wars have been the main catalyst of government-to-government lending. The scale of official credits granted in and around WW1 and WW2 was particularly large, easily surpassing the scale of total international bailout lending after the 2008 crash. During peacetime, development finance and financial crises are the main drivers of official cross-border finance, with official flows often stepping in when private flows retrench. In line with predictions of recent theoretical contributions, this paper finds that official lending increases with the degree of economic integration. In financial crises, governments help those countries to which they have greater trade and banking exposure, hoping to reduce the collateral damage to their own economies. Since the 2000s, official finance has made a sharp comeback, largely due to the rise of China as an international creditor and the return of central bank cross-border lending in times of stress, this time through swap lines.
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Working Paper biblioteca |
Language: | English |
Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021-04
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Subjects: | CAPITAL FLOWS, DISASTER RESPONSE, GLOBAL SAFETY NET, BAILOUTS, OFFICIAL LENDING, NATURAL DISASTER, SOVEREIGN DEBT, CENTRAL BANK COORDINATION, |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/858211617653033046/Coping-with-Disasters-Two-Centuries-of-International-Official-Lending https://hdl.handle.net/10986/35407 |
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Summary: | Official ending is much larger than
commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border
capital flows, especially during wars, financial crises and
natural catastrophes. This paper assembles the first
comprehensive long-run dataset of official international
loans, covering 230,000 loans, grants and guarantees
extended by governments, central banks, and multilateral
institutions in the period 1790–2015. Historically, wars
have been the main catalyst of government-to-government
lending. The scale of official credits granted in and around
WW1 and WW2 was particularly large, easily surpassing the
scale of total international bailout lending after the 2008
crash. During peacetime, development finance and financial
crises are the main drivers of official cross-border
finance, with official flows often stepping in when private
flows retrench. In line with predictions of recent
theoretical contributions, this paper finds that official
lending increases with the degree of economic integration.
In financial crises, governments help those countries to
which they have greater trade and banking exposure, hoping
to reduce the collateral damage to their own economies.
Since the 2000s, official finance has made a sharp comeback,
largely due to the rise of China as an international
creditor and the return of central bank cross-border lending
in times of stress, this time through swap lines. |
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