国际经济论坛

会议名称：Macroeconomic implications of Chinese debt restructurings: a case study and econometric approach

报告人：程功， 国际清算银行亚太区办公室资深经济学家

主持人： 孙靓莹

时间：2020年5月27日 周二上午9:30-11:00

本次活动由 国际发展研究室、发展研究中心 主办

        报告人简介： Cheng Gong is currently a senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements, covering analytical works on capital flow management, fintech and sovereign debt restructuring.

Before joining the BIS, Cheng Gong was a senior economist at the European Stability Mechanism where he led the policy and research work on crisis management. He especially set up the network of Regional Financing Arrangements (RFAs) and contributed to enhancing the collaboration between these regional crisis resolution mechanisms and the IMF. Cheng Gong worked previously as an economist in the International Macroeconomics Division at the Banque de France, with a focus on global economy-related issues, such as global imbalances, and reforms in the international monetary system.

Cheng Gong holds a PhD in economics from Sciences Po Paris with the highest honors and Masters’ degrees in finance and international political economy from Sciences Po and London School of Economics. His main research field is international macro and finance, with a particular focus on capital flows, official-sector lending, and sovereign risks. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of International Money and Finance, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and World Development, , etc.

        报告内容介绍：This seminar is based on two working papers we have completed recently. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the international community called for bilateral official lenders to provide debt relief to low-income countries. Our first paper presents eight case studies of China’s recent debt relief actions overseas to shed light on their common features and particularities. These eight cases – Cuba (2010), Seychelles (2011), Chad (2017), Zambia (2018), Mozambique (2018), Cameroon (2019), Congo (2019) – highlight China’s growing role in providing debt relief, either in conjunction with other official creditors, such as the Paris Club, or out of its own political initiative. The magnitude of debt relief and restructuring terms vary across different cases and depending on the terms offered by other creditors. Our second paper explores a novel database of 140 Chinese debt restructurings overseas between 2000 and 2019 to extract systematic evidence on the terms that China offered in past debt restructurings and how China interacted with other types of creditors and the IMF. The majority of debt relief operations are executed through direct debt forgiveness rather than rescheduling with maturity extension and interest rate rebate. Using Local Projections, we also tried to identify the macroeconomic implications of Chinese debt relief effort. We find that the macroeconomic impact of Chinese debt restructurings is not strongly pronounced once debt relief by the Paris Club and private sector creditors and the IMF financing are controlled for. However, different terms may entail different macroeconomic effects in line with the literature.