The CORE Econ website uses essential cookies to make our website work. You may disable these using your browser settings but this may affect website functionality (such as your access to logged-in resources). We would also like to use analytics cookies to help us improve the functionality of our website and improve your user experience. These analytics cookies will be set only if you accept. We do not sell or otherwise transfer personal data or usage data to any third parties or use it for any other purpose. For more detailed information about the cookies we use, see our Privacy policy.

Contents

  1. All CORE Insights
  2. List of resources
  3. Highlights
  4. 1 Introduction
  5. 2 Why governments borrow
  6. 3 The scale of government debt: An ever-growing problem
  7. 4 A very short history of government debt in the Global South
  8. 5 Government borrowing to shift spending over time: Consumption
  9. 6 Government borrowing for investment
  10. 7 Conflicts of interest between and within generations
  11. 8 The intertemporal smoothing problem the other way around: Sovereign wealth funds
  12. 9 Conclusion
  13. 10 Acknowledgements
  14. 11 References
  15. Glossary