The impact of sovereign debt restructuring on growth: Evidence from emerging G20 countries

Sovereigns with unsustainable debt burden have the potential to experience sovereign debt defaults and/or debt crises. These kind of undesired circumstances may cause serial sovereign debt restructurings. The last sovereign debt restructuring treatments is called 'final restructuring'. After final restructurings, by means of a number of factors such as re-access to the financial markets, positive impact of debt relief and improvement in the cost of borrowing the countries may have a much more stable growth performance relative to the pre-restructuring period. In this context, this thesis aims to examine the impact of sovereign debt restructuring treatments on the growth in Emerging G20 countries. In order to test this possible interaction, Ordinary Least Squares is applied to each country separately, due to their high degree of heterogeneity. In accordance with the results, most of sovereign debt restructuring operations have a significant impact on the annual GDP growth rate of the selected countries. Moreover, an important part of the sovereign debt restructuring treatments has positive impact on growth. However, in some countries, there is not observed a statistically significant impact of sovereign debt restructuring operations on growth.