Reports

It is generally recognized that the lack of comprehensive data an the external indebtedness of less-developed countries constitutes a major gap in the information required by both borrowers and lenders. It has even been suggested that the inadequacy of data perhaps contributed to the recent external debt crises. For most of the last decade, only, two agencies, viz,, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compiled and published debt statistics of countries. While these sources provided reliable estimates of debt to official (i.e., bilateral and multilateral) creditors, the data could not be used to estimate total debts to private creditors.