Tag Archives: Quasi-sovereign debt

Quasi-Sovereign Debt

In the FT, Elaine Moore and Jonathan Wheatley report about the increasing importance of sovereign-backed corporate and other debt in emerging markets.

New figures from JPMorgan and Bond Radar show that issuance of quasi-sovereign bonds outpaced that of sovereign bonds in emerging markets last year, raising the stock of such debt from $710bn in 2014 to a record $839bn by the end of 2015. By comparison, the stock of all external emerging market sovereign debt stood at $750bn at the end of last year, according to JPMorgan.

Quasi-sovereign borrowers include firms that are owned in large parts or controlled by the state, as well as local governments. Although the liabilities of these borrowers may be explicitly or implicitly guaranteed by the state, the official public debt statistics typically do not account for them.