The 3 principles behind sound and sustainable national debt policy
Knowing whether public debt is sustainable is as critical for economists analysing fiscal policy as for practitioners tasked with charting desirable policy paths.
Xavier Debrun is deputy chief of the Fiscal Policy and Surveillance Division in the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund. Since joining the Fund in 2000, he worked mainly in the Research Department, contributing to the World Economic Outlook, and in the Fiscal Affairs Department as fiscal economist on the South-Africa and Hungary country teams. In 2006-07, he was a Visiting Fellow at Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute and the HEC business school in Geneva. He has published extensively on regional monetary integration, fiscal policy, and public debt sustainability analysis.