Improving Public Debt Management

In the OIC Member Countries

international organizations or are private consultants. About one in two WES experts holds a

degree in economics and over 40% have a Ph.D. 76% are between 35 and 65 years old and

86% are male. Participation is strictly voluntary and experts do not receive a monetary

compensation.

Besides the standard questions on economic conditions, which are repeated in each of the

quarterly WES issues, WES also contains a oneoff question on current economic or political

relevant issues in the world. In the WES survey from the fourth quarter of 2016, experts were

asked for their assessment of public debt management in their home country (the survey form

is included in Appendix A, Figure A01). The experts’ answers provide new insights in the

evaluation of public debt management in general and the functioning of the domestic market

for public debt in particular.

The questions were answered during the month of October by

more than 1070 experts in 113 countries.

In the first question on public debt management, WES experts were asked to provide their

opinion on the efficiency of public debt management. The precise wording of the question was:

“How do you assess the public debt management of your country?” The possible answers were

“efficient”, “satisfactory” and “not efficient”. On average experts consider public debt

management in their country to be below satisfactory levels. If numbers were assigned to the

answers such that the neutral answer “satisfactory”=0 and “efficient”=1 and “not efficient”=1,

the average across all responses amounts to 0.24. There is a marked difference between

countries of different stances of development with the assessment improving in the level of

income:

whereas highincome countries’ debt management is assessed as satisfactory (0.05),

it is worst in lowincome countries (0.57). Results for OIC countries very much resemble those

for middleincome countries. Only 7% of OIC experts assess public debt management as

efficient in their country, while the answers “satisfactory” and “not efficient” are given with

almost equal frequency.

Figure 216 shows the shares of the three categories in total answers: When moving from highto lowincome countries, the share of experts considering public debt management as

“efficient” decreases, while the share of those answering “not efficient” increases. If

differentiated by regional groups, public debt management is assessed best in Western Europe,

whereas Africa, North America and countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States

(CIS) are attributed the least efficient policies (not shown).

Researchers interested in using these data may contact the LMUifo Economics & Business Data Center (EBDC).

When incomegroups are used, the average is calculated in a twostep procedure: First, the country average is computed as

the simple arithmetic mean of the individual responses for the respective country. Second, the unweighted mean over

those countries that belong to the income group under consideration is calculated. In contrast to the standard WES

procedure country averages are not weighted by the countries’ share in world trade since the purpose of the analysis is

to draw a picture of public debt management of an average country independently of country sizes.