In the wake of the global financial crisis, there has been strong, renewed interest in the behavior of public debt, especially in advanced economies. However, empirical work on debt cycles and debt sustainability has been constrained in the past by lack of public debt datasets covering long time periods and a wide group of countries. The most widely used sources of cross-country public debt data are the International Financial Statistics (IFS) and Government Finance Statistics (GFS) databases published by the IMF; and the Global Development Finance (GDF) dataset of the World Bank. Other regional and institutional bodies, such as the.
