Estimates of the Total External Debt of the Developing Member Countries of ADB: 1981-1983

Abstract

It is generally recognized that the lack of comprehensive data and the external indebtedness of less-developed countries constitutes a major gap in the information required by both borrowers and lenders. It has even been suggested that the inadequacy of data perhaps contributed to the recent external debt crises.1/ For most of the last decade, only two agencies, viz,, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compiled and published debt statistics of countries. While these sources provided reliable estimates of debt to official (i.e., bilateral and multilateral) creditors, the data could not be used to estimate total debts to private creditors. The need to fill this gap could well have been the primary motivation for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to start publishing in 1978 the assets and liabilities of commercial banks in 14 industrial countries and for the commercial banks themselves to jointly put up the international Institute of Finance in 1982. In Januarv 1984, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) introduced a number of international banking statistics tables in International Financial Statistics (IFS).