I, What is international debt?
International debt, also known as foreign debt, is the entire debt with contractual repayment obligations, including the principal to be repaid and the interest to be paid, that has been allocated to a non-resident by a resident of a country at any given time. International commercial debt collection cannot be understood as mere debt collection. International commercial debt collection refers to the contact and cooperation with overseas commercial debt collection organizations, law firms, detective companies and other institutions to legally carry out commercial debt collection services, reduce the risk rate of enterprises and bad debt rate, prevent and avoid the credit risk brought about by the use of credit sales method.
II, How to deal with international debt
1, According to the source of repayment can be divided into: cash remittance, local currency exchange repayment and repayment by production top into.
2, According to the repayment method, it can be divided into: equal principal, fixed annuity, lump sum repayment and other methods.
3, According to the responsibility of repayment can be divided into: the national unified repayment, local departments to repay and project units to repay.
III, What is an international debt crisis
Debt crisis refers to a country's inability to pay its foreign debt, including sovereign debt and private debt, on time, manifested as a large number of public or private sectors are unable to pay off the foreign debt due, a country is forced to request debt rescheduling and international assistance.
The outbreak of an international debt crisis is the result of a combination of domestic and international factors, but the external causes are often uncontrollable in nature and always work through the internal causes. Therefore, fundamentally, the direct cause of debt crises is internal, i.e., the result of blind borrowing, misuse and mismanagement of international capital.
The specific manifestations of the international debt crisis are
(i) Inflation of external debt
If external debt is seen as a source of construction finance, an appropriate scale of borrowing needs to be determined. Because the accumulation of funds mainly relies on domestic savings to achieve, foreign capital can only play a supporting role; moreover, too much borrowing if the lack of corresponding domestic funds and other conditions of cooperation, macroeconomic efficiency will not be due to improve, and may lead to debt crisis due to the heavy debt burden. Debt service ratios are now generally used internationally as a criterion for controlling debt. Because the repayment of external debt ultimately depends on a country's ability to generate foreign exchange from exports, the scale of external debt borrowing is subject to the ability to repay it in the future, i.e., to expand the ability to generate foreign exchange from exports. If the growth rate of debt is consistently higher than the growth rate of exports, this indicates that there are serious problems in the use and repayment of international capital movements. Theoretically, a country should keep the ratio of debt service to export earnings for the year below 20%, beyond which the borrowing country should pay great attention.
(ii) Unreasonable structure of external debt
Other things being equal, the structure of external debt plays an important role in the evolution of debt. The main manifestations of unreasonable external debt structure are
1, Excessive proportion of commercial loans
The maturity of commercial loans is generally short, and international banks are willing to lend continuously when the economy is better or when all parties are unanimously optimistic about the economic development. But in the economic development once there are some unstable factors, such as the government's fiscal deficit, a huge trade deficit or political instability, etc. so that market participants lose confidence, foreign exchange reserves are not enough to pay off foreign debt due, the exchange rate is bound to fall sharply. At this point, banks are no longer willing to lend new money when it is due. In order to repay the foreign debt due, there is a shortage of foreign exchange funds at this time instead of large-scale outflow, so that the crisis broke out.
2, Foreign debt currency is too concentrated
If a country's foreign debt is concentrated in one or two currencies, the exchange rate risk will become bigger, and once the foreign currency appreciates, the foreign debt will increase, making it more difficult to repay.
3, Unreasonable maturity structure
If the proportion of short-term external debt is too large and exceeds the international alert line, or if the debt servicing period is not reasonably arranged, it will result in a concentration of debt servicing time, and a crisis will break out if the liquidity is not sufficient to pay the external debt as it falls due.
(iii) Inappropriate use of external debt
Once the scale and structure of debt borrowing is determined, how to invest it in the appropriate sectors and maximize the effectiveness of its use is the ultimate guarantee of debt repayment. In the long term, debt servicing capacity depends on a country's economic growth rate, and in the short term on its export rate. So, the real concern is not the size of the debt, but the productive capacity of the debt and its ability to generate foreign exchange. Many debtor countries, having raised a large amount of debt, have not formulated a strategy for the use of external debt and debt servicing based on a combination of factors such as the amount of investment, the duration of debt servicing, the exchange rate generated by the project and the speed and objectives of macroeconomic development, and have blindly engaged in the construction of large projects regardless of the financial, material and human resources of the country. As such projects cost money and have a long construction period, it is difficult to form production capacity and create enough foreign exchange in the short term, resulting in accelerated debt accumulation. At the same time, not only is the efficiency of the foreign debt used for projects low, but also a considerable part of the foreign debt does not flow into the production field or used in the import of capital goods, but blindly imports an excessive amount of consumer durables and luxury goods; this inevitably leads to a lower investment rate and weakening of debt servicing capacity. Unjustified consumer demand, in turn, is the cause of lower savings rates, making internal accumulation capacity unable to keep up with the growth of capital, which in turn contributes to a further increase in external debt. Some countries borrowed large amounts of short-term loans for long-term investment in the country, and the direction of investment was mainly in the real estate and stock markets, thus forming a bubble economy, and once the bubble burst, the crisis came.
(iv) Lack of macro-level unified management and control of external debt
The management of external debt requires technical and institutional management of external debt and assets by the state to improve the return on international borrowing and reduce the risk of external debt, so that risk and return can be combined in the most satisfactory way. This effective management is the key to avoiding debt crises. Its management is quite extensive, involving all aspects of borrowing, spending and repayment of external debt, and requires policy coordination across government departments. If the management of borrowed foreign debt is confused, multiple borrowings are made and foreign investment is introduced in an uncontrolled manner, the scale of debt is often out of control and the debt structure tends to be non-rationalized, which prevents the government from making timely adjustments to its policies in accordance with the actual debt situation which has changed, and once the government finds that the policies have deviated too much from the planned objectives, difficulties in debt servicing have often already been formed.
(v) Deteriorating foreign trade situation and sharp decline in export earnings
As a country's ability to generate foreign exchange determines its debt servicing capacity, once a country fails to adjust its export product mix to changes in the international market in a timely manner, its export earnings will drop significantly and its current account deficit will widen, thus seriously affecting its debt servicing capacity. At the same time, a large current account deficit further creates a dependence on foreign capital, and a debt crisis can erupt if international investors stop lending or refuse to extend loans to a debtor country because their confidence in its economic prospects is greatly diminished. Debt crises seriously disrupt the normal order of development of international economic relations and are a major potential source of disruption to the international financial system, especially for the countries where they occur, with serious consequences for economic and social development.
Generally speaking, for international debt, it is possible to determine the repayment of cash remittances, or equal principal, plus a fixed annuity for a one-time repayment, or a unified national repayment to deal with it.
