‘Crushing’ debt crisis spells development disaster for billions: UN chief
(United Nations News) Half of humanity lives in countries that are forced to spend more on servicing their debt than on health and education, which is nothing less than a development disaster, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday.
According to a new report by the UN Global Crisis Response Group, entitled A World of Debt, a total of 52 countries – almost 40 per cent of the developing world – are in “serious debt trouble”, Mr. Guterres said, backing calls for them to receive urgent fiscal relief.
Mr. Guterres recalled that the Bridgetown Agenda, led by Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados and the recent Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in Paris, had generated “other important proposals” regarding international debt relief, and expressed hopes that the upcoming G20 meeting in September will take some of these ideas forward.
Last year global public debt reached a record $92 trillion, of which developing countries shoulder 30 per cent – a “disproportionate amount”, the UN chief stressed.
He warned that 3.3 billion people suffer from their governments’ need to prioritize debt interest payments over “essential investments” in the Sustainable Development Goals or the energy transition.
“And yet, because these unsustainable debts are concentrated in poor countries, they are not judged to pose a systemic risk to the global financial system,” the UN Secretary-General added.
He insisted that the catastrophic levels of public debt in developing countries are a “systemic failure” that resulted from colonial-era inequality built into “our outdated financial system”.
Read more at: United Nations News
Source: CARICOM TODAY