Sovereign debt and defaults: A global study

Governments borrow money locally and globally with an objective of economic growth and to govern. Financial distress and defaults in business and firms may cause stress and distress in the local economy which may spill over to other integrated economies. On the contrary, inefficient handling of an economy may negatively affect the inherent business and firms. This is an uncertain vicious cycle and a study of corporate distress is imperative along with a study on country distress. There have been a few studies in this direction, but very few refer to the use of logistic regression in the context of debt defaults across the globe. This study is an attempt in this direction. The research uses the level of Debt/GDP ratio of a country to categorize defaulting countries. A total of nine variables for 111 countries, globally, were studied for the time period 2015-2017 where binary and multinomial logistic regression were used as a primary technique of analysis. Exploratory factor analysis and qualitative analysis were also done in the study. Out of total 111 sample countries, 38 (34%) were found to default based on 2017 data of Debt/GDP ratio. The study found international factors and local factors as the two components affecting debt default in countries. Read more.