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:
“The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“While the onset of puberty can vary by as much as six years, every adolescent wants to be right on the 50-yard line, right in the middle of the field. One is always too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too hairy, too clear-skinned, too early, too late. Understandably, problems of self-image are rampant.”
—Joan Lipsitz (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)