Georgetown Law and Partners Launch Innovative Tool for Public Debt Accountability

Global public debt – the total amount of money governments around the world have borrowed at home and abroad – reached its highest level ever last year, topping $100 trillion dollars, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Such heavy debt burdens can severely constrain economic growth, especially in developing countries. There is now a new tool policymakers, researchers and the general public can use to access information about public debt worldwide: the #PublicDebtIsPublic platform, developed by the Sovereign Debt Forum (SDF) at the Georgetown Law Institute of International Economic Law (IIEL) and Queen Mary University London, together with the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy’s Massive Data Institute (MDI) and other partners.

“I had argued for a debt document repository in an article years ago; many others have too. The problem is that while everyone likes the idea of a public good, it’s not anyone’s job to produce it. So we joined forces with like-minded partners – students, researchers, practitioners – to create the missing information platform,” said Professor Anna Gelpern, SDF co-director. “It’s been very gratifying to hear people say since the launch that they can’t believe this didn’t exist before,” she added.

#PublicDebtIsPublic collects and organizes information about the terms and conditions of government debt from public sources. The initiative shines a light on contract terms usually hidden behind debt statistics – terms that can impose onerous policy commitments, block debt disclosure, interfere with debt relief or divert scarce export revenues to pay a select group of creditors. At capacity, the #PublicDebtIsPublic platform will cover all borrowing governments, and will complement contract data with information about each country’s legal framework for government borrowing and lending. The platform is intended to be a “one-stop shop” for policymakers, civil society groups, market participants and scholars to find and compare debt terms. Unlike other sources of information about public debt, it is not designed to meet the needs of a specific researcher, NGO, government or creditor; instead, it is intended to serve the broadest possible range of users.

#PublicDebtIsPublic made its prototype debut on the Law Center campus in October, during the Eighth Interdisciplinary Sovereign Debt Research and Management Conference (better known as DebtCon8). For the launch panel, Gelpern was joined by Jasper Wesseling, Treasurer General at the Ministry of Finance of the Netherlands; MDI Director Professor Lisa Singh; Stephen Park of the University of Connecticut School of Business; Ana Patricia Muñoz, Executive Director of the International Budget Partnership; and Elsie Addo Awadzi, L’13, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana and current Women in Public Leadership Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, to talk about how different stakeholders in the public, private and academic sectors might make use of the platform.

Professor Anna Gelpern, standing, speaking at the launch event.

“All governments have public debt. Public debt is a promise of your people’s future efforts. And it’s kind of amazing that in a world where a publicly traded company like General Motors has to publish the full text of its contracts within four days of having borrowed, the actual public debt is disclosed episodically, inconsistently, unintelligibly. And so that’s why we’re here,” said Gelpern in her remarks.

Gelpern described herself as “over the moon” to be working with Georgetown colleagues from MDI on the pilot project, which was supported by a grant from the Gates Foundation and a gift from the Finance Ministry of the Netherlands. “MDI is phenomenal at working with data. They are all about making data meaningful to the public and actionable.” SDF Fellow Katherine Shen, SDF Program Associate Whitney Carr, former student researcher Sarah Ludwick, L‘23, and Professor from Practice Sean Hagan, L’86, have also been instrumental to the platform’s development, Gelpern said.

At the end of the launch presentation, the audience was invited to visit computer stations around the conference area to interact with the pilot platform themselves. SDF and its partners plan to scale up the platform to include documents and legal frameworks for all countries and debt instruments over the next five years.

At the end of the launch presentation, DebtCon8 attendees who had contributed to developing the platform prototype – including virtual participants – gathered for a group photo.