Four out of ten people in the world live in a country that spends more money servicing the interest on its sovereign debts than it does on education or health care. Such figures may feel abstract to creditors, which are primarily wealthy countries, multilateral banks, and large bondholders, but they could not be more consequential to debt-burdened countries. Every dollar spent repaying sovereign debt is a dollar that could have been spent on public services—building roads, fixing schools, climate-proofing infrastructure, paying doctors and civil servants. It’s in this way that repayment schemes, many of them predatory, help keep developing countries under the weight of debts that seem unshakeable.
Low- and middle-income…
