Rowan Rockafellow (罗安)

📣Excited to share new @cgdev.org research w co-conspirators @clemencelanders.bsky.social & Rowan Rockafellow exploring an alternative funding path for the Global Fund in a shrinking aid landscape

Full disclosure, it's a bit wonky🤓 so hang on for the ride

Summary blog: www.cgdev.org/blog/weather...

And, finally, I really like this chart.

New and improved WB debt reporting system should allow countries to opt-in to loan-level disclosure. Other recommendations include standardized DMO software, enhanced TA, MDB data reconciliation, and improved PDM legal frameworks.

Borrowers, creditors, and IFIs all have parts to play in promoting transparency. Transparency-positive covenants, improved MDB data, and creditor disclosure help. But borrowers ultimately pay the uncertainty premia for opaque debt stacks alone.

Debt swaps are exciting, but without disclosure of pre- and post-swap financial terms, associated spending commitments, and guarantee fees, it’s impossible to evaluate how efficient they really are.

CRDC benefits limited by T&C inconsistency across borrowers and lenders.

Lots of restructuring happening outside the common framework. @agelpern.bsky.social, what happens when the creditor from a bilateral restructuring claims prior treatment in a subsequent comprehensive restructuring?

Collateralized loans and repos make for prolonged, messy restructurings. They appear to get restructured a lot. They also dilute and subordinate other creditors. Uncertainty around details of these contracts undermines sovereign credit analysis and likely widens uncertainty premia.

Publish What You Lend Just how bad is the debt crisis in developing countries? We know that it’s bad—most African countries are currently spending more on repayments than on health or education. But we don’t know exactly h...

Only 25% of countries publish loan-level data on new borrowing. Contract-level transparency is even rarer, despite real benefits for borrowing costs and fiscal governance.
www.cgdev.org/blog/publish...

High-level debt data isn’t enough. Amid tight financing conditions, countries turn to complex, opaque credit instruments. Private placements, collateralized loans, repos, central bank swaps, and debt conversions provide liquidity but carry uncertainty. Contract-level transparency is needed.

High-level debt data is improving. Share of low-income countries with 2+ year old data is down 15 percentage points. 80% now publish external, domestic, central government-guaranteed debt. World Bank IDS data added $630 B previously undisclosed loan commitments since 2018.

Radical Debt Transparency Report This report calls for a radical shift toward debt transparency as critical to debt sustainability, urging legislative reforms, stronger oversight of unconventional debt, broader loan-level reporting, ...

Sovereign debt data is improving, but the devil is in the details.

In a new WB report, @diegorivetti.bsky.social , @davidmihalyi.bsky.social, Ainrudh Bharadwaj, Roberto Lobarinhas, and I look at how debt transparency has evolved since COVID.

Lots of interesting tidbits. A few of my thoughts: