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Restoring a country's debt to a sustainable path after a sovereign debt restructuring is key to ensuring a credible and durable exit from the crisis. In recent years, a number of countries have restructured their sovereign liabilities, either following a default, or preemptively, to avoid a default. This Occasional Paper takes stock of the experiences of some of these countries--Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Moldova, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, and Uruguay--with debt-restructuring operations, with a view to assessing the outcomes and whether debt sustainability has been restored. The emphasis of the study is on sovereign debt owed to private creditors.

Although the impact of the global crisis has been severe, real per capita GDP growth stayed positive in two-thirds of low-income countries (LICs), unlike in previous global downturns, and in contrast to richer countries. Emerging from the Global Crisis explores how LICS have coped with the global economic crisis. It reviews the impact of the crisis on LICs, domestic policy responses to the crisis, and the precrisis conditions of select countries. The prospects and challenges that LICs face are also considered. Sections of the paper look at growth prospects, policy recommendations, the general macroeconomic outlook, as well as the rebuilding of fiscal buffers. The authors also'stress-test'LICs'exposure to further volatility by using a hypothetical'downside'recovery scenario.

This forthcoming title in the Departmental Paper Series describes the special challenges facing low-income countries as economic growth contracts by an estimated 1.1 percent globally. Coping with the Crisis: Challenges Facing Low-Income Countries provides an assessment of the implications of the financial crisis for low-income countries, evaluates the short-term macroeconomic outlook for these countries, and discusses the policy challenges they face. Chapters cover the outlook for global economic growth and commodity prices, an overview of how low-income countries have been affected, fiscal policy, monetary and exchange rate policy responses, potential external financing needs and how the international community, including the IMF, can help countries meet them. The challenges ahead for low-income countries are delineated, including debt vulnerabilities and the need for countries to develop well-regulated local capital markets and banking systems, as well as enhanced public sector efficiency.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the frequency of currency and balance of payments crises in developing countries. More important, the crises have become more virulent, have caused widespread disruption to other developing countries, and have even had repercussions on advanced economies. To predict crises, their causes must be clearly understood. Two competing strands of theories are reviewed in this paper. The first focuses on the consequences of such policies as excessive credit growth in provoking depletion of foreign exchange reserves and making a devaluation enevitable. The second emphasizes the trade-offs between internal and external balance that the policymaker faces in defending a peg.