Skip Navigation


Contributions to Political Economy Advance Access originally published online on March 30, 2008
Contributions to Political Economy 2008 27(1):91-113; doi:10.1093/cpe/bzn003
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
27/1/91    most recent
bzn003v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Helleiner, E.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved

The Mystery of the Missing Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism

Eric Helleiner

Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave. West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1

The absence of a formal international regulatory mechanism to facilitate sovereign debt restructuring has long been recognized as a most serious gap in the architecture of global finance. Why has it proven so difficult to create such a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM) at the international level? Political economists have devoted relatively little scholarly attention to this question. This paper attempts to begin to fill this gap in the literature by examining four failed initiatives to create a SDRM over the past century. In place of a realist or structural Marxist account, the paper puts forward a more contingent explanation for these failures that highlights three distinct political problems that must be overcome in the construction of a SDRM: (1) collective action problems on both the side of sovereign debtors and that of private foreign creditors; (2) basic distributional conflicts embodied in any debt restructuring effort; and (3) the uncertain behavior of the private creditors' home states.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.