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Washington, DC – April 23, 2025: The Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable (GSDR) met yesterday and reviewed progress on the work to improve debt restructuring processes and timelines, and to help address debt vulnerabilities.
Participants also discussed priority areas for the work going forward. At the end of the meeting, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, World Bank Group President Ajay Banga, and Finance Minister of South Africa, G20 Presidency, Enoch Godongwana, co-chairs of the GSDR, issued the attached “Restructuring Playbook“, which aims to provide debtor country authorities considering a debt restructuring with the key steps, concepts and processes for such an operation.
They also issued the attached GSDR 4th Cochairs Report as well as the compilation of technical issues discussed by the GSDR so far.
The GSDR brings together debtor countries and official and private creditors with the objective to build common understanding among key stakeholders on debt sustainability and debt restructuring challenges, and ways to address them.
The GSDR 4th Co-chairs report reveals that, public debt levels in low-income countries (LICs) and emerging markets (EMs) were already high before the COVID-19 pandemic and have increased further due to the pandemic.
While, on average, debt levels in LICs and EMs have stabilized since, and are expected to remain stable or decline slightly over the medium term for both LICs and EMs, they remain higher than preCOVID, with a few countries particularly vulnerable. In addition, many countries, particularly among LICs, face elevated debt service challenges.
While their debt is sustainable, high interest costs or/and refinancing needs crowd out the space available for development spending such as education, health, and infrastructure investment. Recent developments, including elevated policy uncertainty and tighter financial conditions, especially for frontier markets, have increased debt-related risks.
“Since the GSDR last met at Principals level in October 2024, on-going restructuring cases have reached further important milestones, both under the Common Framework (CF) and outside. Additional progress has been reached on advancing the common understanding on debt vulnerabilities and on ways to improve restructuring processes,” read the report.
