A Historical Public Debt Database

By S. Ali Abbas, Nazim Belhocine, Asmaa Elganainy, Mark A Horton, Sarah Buss, Raquel Gomez-Sierra, Nezha Khaneboubi, O. Fernandes. Social Science Research Network, 2010

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper describes the compilation of the first truly comprehensive database on gross government debt-to-GDP ratios, covering nearly the entire IMF membership (174 countries) and spanning an exceptionally long time period. The database was constructed by bringing together a number of other datasets and information from original sources. For the most recent years, the data are linked to the IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) database to facilitate regular updates. The paper discusses the evolution of debt-to-GDP ratios across country groups for several decades, episodes of debt spikes and reversals, and a pattern of negative correlation between debt and growth.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bbb5e29bc76675ae3b73185c17e9077742742ee

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Citations in the corpus

Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts (2011, methodology): “49 For the same reason, we now use public debt to GDP data by Abbas et al. (2010). These data do not differentiate by debt owed to private or to public creditors.”
Cecchetti , Mohanty and Zampolli The real effects of debt The real effects of debt (2011, unknown): “In addition to putting further pressures on public finances, ageing itself might also reduce per capita growth, making it potentially even more difficult for a country to sustain a given level of 42 See eg Auerbach (2011), Cecchetti et al (2011), Gagnon (2011) and IMF (2011).”
Public debt and economic growth: Is there a causal effect? (2014, background): “(3) (3)However, Minea and Parent (2012) show that the negative correlation between debt and growth vanishes when they use the IMF public debt data set (Abbas et al., 2010). Furthermore, their panel smooth threshold regression model finds that the correlation between debt and growth becomes positive ”
Flexible Fiscal Rules and Countercyclical Fiscal Policy (2016, unknown): “Ali Abbas et al. (2010) ©International Monetary Fund.”
Systemic Banking Crises Database: An Update (2012, unknown): “Our primary data source is Abbas et al. (2010) for crisis episodes prior to 2007 and the Fall 2011 WEO for crisis episodes since 2007.”
The Political Economy of Government Debt (2015, background): “1880 1900 1950 2000 Years France Germany Finland Austria Denmark Spain Source: Abbas et al. (2010)”
Sovereign Debt Relief and its Aftermath (2016, methodology): “Reinhart & Trebesch Sovereign Debt Relief 19 from Abbas et al. (2010).”
Is High Public Debt Always Harmful to Economic Growth? Reinhart and Rogoff and some complex nonlinearities (2012, methodology): “Second, we use the very recent Ali Abbas et al. (2010) database on public debt.”
Aid, China, and Growth: Evidence from a New Global Development Finance Dataset (2023, background): “6 Our control variables originate from Rich (2009); Voeten, Strezhnev, and Bailey (2009); Abbas et al. (2010); Mayer and Zignago (2011); British Geological Survey (2016); Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers (2016); UN Comtrade (2017); and the World Bank (2017). Online Appendix B14 contains the descriptive s”
Do Giant Oilfield Discoveries Fuel Internal Armed Conflicts (2011, methodology): “In addition, we supplement the PWT data with International Monetary Fund (IMF) data (Abbas et al. 2010) on public debt as a percentage of GDP.”