RDP 9405: External Debt and Liabilities of Industrial Countries 1. Introduction

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) publishes statistics on Australia's international investment position, including external debt. International investment position statistics aim to measure the external financial assets and liabilities of a country's residents. The data can be analysed in a number of different ways. In Australia, the most common approach is to distinguish between debt and equity instruments. The former are characterised by a contractual obligation to the payment of interest and/or principal while equity is a claim on residual income and value.

Most industrial countries do not publish as comprehensive a set of international investment position statistics as does Australia. They usually provide data on their total external assets and liabilities along with some disaggregation, but this usually does not include external debt. Indeed, it is not possible to derive external debt statistics directly from published national sources for many industrial countries. This lack of data has hampered the international comparison of external indebtedness and is in sharp contrast to the situation for developing countries for which data on gross external debt are readily available and published by several international institutions.

The paper presents a consistent time series of data on external debt and the overall international investment position of the industrial countries, together with data on the external debt position of selected developing countries. The data are classified in a number of ways: by type of instrument (debt and equity); by function (direct and portfolio investment); and by sector (official and non-official). The data are based on national sources. This approach is similar to that followed by the Institute of International Finance (1991, 1992), but extends that work by deriving external debt statistics for the industrial countries.

In the next section of the paper some general principles and definitions concerning international investment position statistics are discussed, along with the classification systems used in the paper. Section 3 discusses the comparability of data across countries. Section 4 provides summary statistics on external debt and liabilities. Concluding comments can be found in Section 5. Appendix A and B provide country-specific summary tables for industrial and selected developing countries, respectively. Detailed notes on national sources and how each country's data were constructed are presented in Appendix C.