Robust accountability requires the public to have meaningful access to information about government borrowing terms. Thus, all material information about sovereign borrowing and lending should be presumptively public, accessible, and intelligible to everyone.

Our Mission

Despite the broad consensus on the importance of debt transparency, information about government borrowing terms remains generally inaccessible and unintelligible to key stakeholders, most importantly the public. Our goal is to shift debt transparency norms and practices to establish a presumption in favor of meaningful public access to the legal and financial terms of public debt.

What Is the #PDIP Initiative?

#PDIP initiative will create the first centrally-collated web-based sovereign debt documentation and data commons using materials in the public domain. 

By publicizing full-text documentation in a format that is publicly standardized, comparable, and intelligible, the #PDIP initiative seeks to:

• Show that a significant amount of relevant information is already in the public domain, but is inaccessible and unintelligible to the public. 
• Show that the benefits of public access to public debt terms outweigh the costs, public and private. 
• Encourage debtors, creditors, and other stakeholders to share relevant information in the public domain.

We are committed to establishing a new norm where transparency in sovereign debt is the default, not the exception.

The #PublicDebtisPublic Data Commons is a collaboration between the Sovereign Debt Forum at Georgetown Law, The Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London.