Talk:Developing countries' debt

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Contents 1 Moving the page 2 Need for serious revision 3 Heading 4 Numbers 5 Expansion request 6 On It 7 Numbers II (scales) 8 Sketchy on certain details 9 "Unpayable debt" 10 Elaboration on euphemism? 11 World Debt redirect 12 Jubilee USA 13 Arguments about Third World Debt

[edit] Moving the page

Agree that it needs serious revision. I'd be happy to have a stab at it. t's an important topic not being well served by this article. And agree it needs to move. Should be "Third World Debt" as below. "Developing World Debt" is a way of putting it which tries not to assume the truth of dependency theory, but which missed the point that the countries in question were un-developing during the 1980s and 1990s. So it should be moved/renamed. Jubilee USA is a good source, but Wikipedia loves glorious diversity (to paraphrase Kevin Costner's Robin Hood). Perspective Vortex (talk) 21:45, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Need for serious revision

The leading paragaphs are very poorly written and full of mistakes. I'm removing the term "Majority World" since I've never seen it before in my work in development economics, and I've fixed some spelling errors, but somebody needs to gut this and start over. 203.199.50.16 09:56, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

i agree. it also relies too much on information from Jubilee USA--authors need to diversify their sources.--67.80.25.183 22:29, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Heading

I find it odd that the article page is called "Developing countries' debt", yet the first line calls it third world countries debt. I'm not sure if this is worth editing or not.

The established term for this concept is "Third World Debt" and that's where the article should be located. Controversy over the term "Third World" (ill-founded, incidentally - its origin is a reference to the Third Estate of the French Revolution) can be mentioned but it is not the place of an encyclopedia to determine the nomenclature.203.199.50.16 09:56, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Totally agree. If there's no dissent, it should be moved (renamed); the article is, incidentally, listed under countering systematic bias as one needing attention. – Kieran T ^{(talk | contribs)}

[edit] Numbers

I'd be interested in seeing numbers. How much do the different developing countries owe, and to whom?

Agreed. Is there any official information regarding who owes how much to who, how much is being paid, comparisons with amount of aid received? Most information I can find contains very few figures and those that do are ambiguous or contradict each other.

Wow, I wrote this comment ages ago, I was really hoping for a reply by now...for this article to make sense we need to know how much is being paid compared with how much is being received? Kernow 13:13, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Expansion request

Nice things to have here:

• Positions pro and con by more people (intellectuals, economists of different schools, even the Catholic Church).
• The issue of writing off debt of countries affected by catastrophes (the 2004 tsunami is one, but also consider Central America and El Niño, etc.).
• Top-ten (or 20 or whatever) of debtors and creditors.
• I can write something about Argentina's debt and default, if pressed...
• Responsibility of creditors (e. g. in Argentina, the IMF recommended measures which depressed the economy).

--Pablo D. Flores 01:21, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] On It

Will start working on the above list immediately

Kestrel76 01:14, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Numbers II (scales)

I didn't specially appreciate 68.35.125.94 changing "thousand millions" to "billions", but I'm not sure if this is a problem. By the context one can guess that a billion means 10^9 and not 10^12, but "thousand million" is completely unambiguous, and in most non-English-speaking countries 1 billion = 10^12. Wikipedia:Numbers mentions no policy or guideline. What should we do? --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 10:48, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sketchy on certain details

This entire article is extremely sketchy on certain details. How exactly does the debt from commercial banks to indebted countries become the responsibility of governments and taxpayers? As I understand it government legislatures are responsible for passing laws, not lending moneys. Central banks of nations manange the money supplies in their own country and are the banker of last resort, but only to other banks in that nation, certainly not to other nations.

Also, if there is bad debt, how is this any different from any other debt that is loaned to anyone else? If banks made poor decisions on lending money, then they should should simply write it off in stead of attempting to turn it into a social issue. If they run into problems there is always the deposit insurance program in most countries.

[edit] "Unpayable debt"

The second paragraph currently refers to "unpayable debt," where the interest payments are greater than a country's GDP. As far as I know, no such situation has ever existed. It is perfectly possible for a country to borrow more than its GDP stock at any point in time - Japan and Italy have been that way for a while - but for the interest payments to be greater than its entire annual output, it would have to borrow many times its own annual output. This is akin to someone in poverty borrowing $1 million US - which no lender would ever allow (and probably infeasible outside of really small countries). There are many countries that have had interest payments that are larger than GDP growth - which is unsustainable in the long run, but easily possible in the short run (and happens any time a country goes into recession). --DMG413 02:41, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Elaboration on euphemism?

"The banks didn't want all of this money lying around so it was leant to the third world countries. Debt then ensued."

The author needs to state why they didn't want the money? This is something that I believe, most definitely needs great explanation since this is what caused much debt.70.68.187.243 07:20, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] World Debt redirect

Redirecting from "World Debt" is plain wrong. World Debt != Third World Debt

[edit] Jubilee USA

This article is starting to look like an advertisement for some organization called Jubilee USA. Almost all the sources link to their website. Anyone have any sources to add that are NOT from this organization??? KristoferM 01:28, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Arguments about Third World Debt

"The history of Mali, for example, from 1968 onwards, provides a clear illustration of this."

You can't say something provides a clear illustration and then not give the illustration. A couple of sentences going into detail would be nice.

--66.7.117.110 (talk) 19:01, 17 April 2008 (UTC)