China Research

African debt needs more transparency which I pointed at several times before. Too much of African countries’ borrowing is summarized on aggregate (macro) levels, too little in micro numbers. However, an interesting change has recently been presented.

Interesting news from the Kiel Institute

Some weeks ago, a serious attempt to create more detailed debt statistics on African  micro levels has been launched by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy/Germany (which conducts a lot of international research, also on emerging countries including since two years ago the introduction of the bimonthly, very quickly updated World Trade Indicator with 75 participating countries and regions, quite a number from the emerging world as well (https://www.ifw-kiel.de/index.php?id=15876). These global trade statistics are based on water-transport big data and interesting AI applications.

You can now look at the following link to get more details on African debt (https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/kiel-working-papers/2022/who-lends-to-africa-and-how-introducing-the-africa-debt-database-17146/):

The Kiel Institute shows understandably that global private and Chinese (governmental) lenders on average charge essentially higher interest rates from African borrowers than multilateral public organizations like the World Bank or the IMF do. This attitude is not really fair – neither as shown by the Chinese and their influential political ambitions nor as applied by global private institutions vis-à-vis tax payers and their indirect contributions to subsidized loans.

According to the Kiel Institute averages credit conditions from multilateral public organizations in the past two decades – as exemplified above – tend to be clearly softer (around 1 %) than the average conditions given by Chinese government banks  (3.2 %) and private bond issuers (6-7 %) .

Altogether, the database of the Kiel Institute contains circa 7400 international loans and bond issues to African borrowers, many times with widely diverging credit conditions. This fact urges for more transparency.

Another three reasons for underlining the need of better transparency for international credits to African countries (projects) can be added:

1) Africa’s capital needs must expand further for achieving visible development progress.

2) Therefore, African debt burden – which already has been increasing strongly in the past few decades – should do so as well in the future.

3) When improving international borrowing and lending transparency, it would be a win-win situation for both the stability of international financial markets and therefore also for single African countries.

Conclusion – the way forward is obvious 

In order to manage the challenges described above, African borrowers should  – together with their lenders – work more ambitiously on the transparency of their international finance conditions. Particularly African borrowers could benefit from such good moves – also by the avoidance of potential financial accidents!

PS: Now I will spend around two months on vacation and special studies – and will be back at the end of August. All the best to you all!

 

Hubert Fromlet
Affiliate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University
Editorial board

 

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