International Debt Statistics 2018

Box O.5 Improvements in Debtor Reporting System Coverage Enhance Debt Transparency (continued)

Figure BO.5.2 Countries with the Largest Cumulative Upward Revisions since International Debt Statistics 2018

Turkmenistan Guinea Chad Myanmar Vanuatu Guinea-Bissau Congo, Dem. Rep. Congo, Rep. Iran, Islamic Rep. Zimbabwe Angola Tanzania Tajikistan Comoros Mongolia Gambia, The South Africa Mauritania El Salvador Tonga Cameroon Eswatini

Example:

According to IDS 2018, Tanzania’s debt stock to official creditors in 2016 was US$9.8 billion. According to IDR 2022, the debt stock to official creditors in 2016 was US$11.8 billion, an upward revision of US$2 billion or more than 16 percent of the initial reporting.

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

Ex post upward revision of the 2016 external public and publicly guaranteed debt stock (%)

Revision of debt to official creditors Revision of debt to private creditors

Source: World Bank International Debt Statistics database. Note: The figure shows the cumulative ex post upward revision of external public and publicly guaranteed debt for the countries with the largest revisions over the past six IDS/IDR vintages. The debt stock in 2016 serves as the comparison year because it is the latest year available in all six vintages. Turkmenistan is an outlier, and its upward revision of 3,200 percent is curtailed for readability. Turkmenistan repaid all obligations to the World Bank in 2018 and was not obligated to report in 2019 and 2020. When the country resumed borrowing from the World Bank in 2021, the old series was restored and significantly revised. IDR = International Debt Report; IDS = International Debt Statistics.

In 19 countries, however, the upward revision was more than 10 percent of the initially reported debt stock. Low-income countries and countries with weak public debt recording and reporting capacity dominate this group (figure BO.5.2).

Debt recording and reporting need to keep up with an increasingly complex borrowing landscape if data are to remain relevant. The revisions described in this box are in part driven by the addition of new debt instruments and expanding coverage of borrower entities, specifically borrowing by state-owned enterprises and central bank liabilities deposits that have become an important financing source in some low- and middle-income countries. Despite the significant progress made in the coverage of debt stocks and flows, important knowledge gaps remain (Pazabarsioglu and Reinhart 2022). They include undisclosed lending terms such as collateralization (Mihalyi et al. 2022) and the issue of “hidden defaults,” that is, the lack of systematic data on credit events with non–Paris Club bilateral creditors and nonbond private external creditors (Horn, Reinhart, and Trebesch 2022).

a. This box is based on a Horn, Mihalyi, and Nickol 2022. b. Another way to look at it is that ex post added commitments accounted for 19 percent of all newly added commitments in vintages 2018 to 2023.