Problems
Sovereign debt problems have been a major public policy issue since World War II, including the treatment of debt related to that war, the developing country "debt crisis" in the 1980s, and the shocks of the 1998 Russian financial crisis and Argentina's default in 2001.
Not all developing countries have been affected to the same extent. For example Yugoslavia had low government debt (perhaps because it was unable to borrow on world markets) until its breakup and the coming of democracy, when the new national governments started to borrow money from the IMF. Croatia has a government debt of $47 billion today while the whole of Yugoslavia (six times as many people as Croatia) in 1980 had debt of $14 billion.
Read more about this topic: Government Debt
Famous quotes containing the word problems:
“If family communication is good, parents can pick up the signs of stress in children and talk about it before it results in some crisis. If family communication is bad, not only will parents be insensitive to potential crises, but the poor communication will contribute to problems in the family.”
—Donald C. Medeiros (20th century)
“More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down—not by solving the problem, but by deciding it’s their own damn fault.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)