Britannica Money (2024)

Third World debt, debt accumulated by Third World (developing) countries. The term is typically used to refer specifically to the external debt those countries owe to developed countries and multilateral lending institutions.

The rapid growth in the external debt of developing countries first became a key issue in the early 1980s, and it persisted into the 21st century. Debt itself is not something that is unique to the developing world. Debt becomes a potential problem only when the borrower is unable to generate sufficient funds to meet the repayments. Many developing (and some developed) countries have encountered such difficulties, and often commentators use the term debt crisis to describe the situation. The issue among developing countries took prominence in August 1982 when Mexico declared that it could no longer meet the repayments on its external debt. In the following decades, many of the poorest countries in the world had to make sacrifices in key areas of public spending (sometimes called austerity measures) in order to service their debt.

During that period the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) became key players by offering conditional loans and advice to try to help manage the debt of developing countries. Nevertheless, debt remained a major issue for many of those countries. In 2010 the total stock of external debt for all developing countries stood at approximately $4 trillion, according to a World Bank study, an amount that represented 21 percent of the gross national income (GNI) of these countries; in the developing countries of Europe and Central Asia alone, external debt was 43 percent of GNI.

Historical origins

The origins of developing-world debt crisis can be traced to the oil-price shock of 1973–74. At the time, the member states of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) limited the supply of oil, which resulted in a huge increase in its price. That had a significant impact on all importers of oil, including many newly independent countries in Africa. The excess profits that OPEC members received were then invested in the Western commercial banking sector. The banks then sought to find new borrowers to lend that money to. Developing countries, which were in need of development assistance to soften the impact of increased oil prices, were considered a sensible and safe option by the banks. That meant that during the second half of the 1970s, a significant proportion of the flows of capital to the developing world came from commercial banks. That flow of funds from OPEC-member states to commercial banks and then on to developing countries has been described as petrodollar recycling.

Three key factors led to the emergence of a crisis in Third World debt in the early 1980s. First, there was a second oil-price shock in 1979. That led to economic recession in Western economies and put a further strain on the balance of payments of oil-importing countries in the developing world. The banks then offered further loans to those countries so that they could satisfy those pressures. Second, a shift in economic policy making took place in the West (in particular the United States and the United Kingdom) that resulted in the use of interest rates to control inflation. With inflation set to rise sharply as a result of the increase in oil prices, interest rates were significantly increased in an effort to contain inflation. That rise in global interest rates dramatically increased the costs of debt servicing for developing countries. Third, the recession in the West multiplied the problems for the developing world. In the face of the need to raise additional foreign exchange to meet their debt repayments, one option would have been to increase their exports. However, the market for what were mostly primary commodities had declined as a result of the economic downturn in the West, and that, in turn, depressed prices for the majority of commodity exports from developing countries.

Interpretations

Two different interpretations of the nature of the developing-world debt crisis emerged in the early 1980s and came to dominate subsequent debate. According to the majority view in the West, the crisis is a threat to the stability of the international financial system as a whole. That stance is often associated with the view that most of the responsibility for the crisis rests with the borrowing countries. It is suggested that they must take responsibility for the loans they took out. By ignoring the underlying problems of their economies and by using private banks to fund serious balance of payments problems, governments in the developing world were avoiding the issue of economic adjustment, according to that view.

A second interpretation, mostly to be found in the developing world itself, argues that the issue of debt is a crisis of development. That stance assigns more responsibility to the commercial banks that, with the support of governments in the West, engaged in a reckless lending strategy.

Management of the debt

The initial response to the developing-world debt crisis was an approach centred on short-term measures to prevent debt defaults. The IMF and the World Bank provided loans that were conditional on borrowing countries’ following a series of structural adjustment measures. Those were designed to increase the productivity of their economies in the hope that such increases would enable them to resolve their problems.

But by the mid-1990s it had become clear that the debt crisis was a long-term phenomenon. Despite most developing countries’ following the adjustment policies of the IMF and the World Bank, the debt problem remained. That resulted in the launch of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative in 1996. For the first time, limited relief of debts owed to the World Bank and the IMF became a strategy used by lenders to address the crisis. However, critics of the HIPC program argued that the relief was still linked to structural-adjustment conditions that were similar to those attached to earlier loans. At the turn of the 21st century, activists and nongovernmental organizations (such as the Jubilee Debt Campaign in Great Britain) also called for wholesale debt cancellation.

References

William R. Cline, International Debt Reexamined (1995); Susan George, A Fate Worse than Debt (1988); Noreena Hertz, The Debt Threat: How Debt Is Destroying the Developing World (2004; also published as IOU: The Debt Threat and Why We Must Defuse It).