Exterrnal Debt Publications and Databases

The World Bank uses a basic presentation of debt statistics in its annual publication, The World Debt Table, where long-term, short-term debt and the use of IMF credit are primary categories. In a second-level classification of long-term debt, public and publicly-guaranteed debt is shown separately from private non-guaranteed debt. This is done because public and publicly-guaranteed debt can be further classified by type of creditor, on the basis of the underlying loan-by-loan records. Data on the non-guaranteed debt of the private sector, on the other hand, is available to the World Bank only on an aggregated basis. The World Bank does not collect data on short-term debt through the Debtor Reporting System. Figures for short-term debt are available for some countries; for other, Bank Staff estimates short-term debt using, as a base, the figures from the Bank for International Settlements on cross-border banking claims. The results, like those on private non-guaranteed debt, are therefore tentative.