VoxEU Talk Economic history

A history of public debt

When we compare ratios of debt to GDP, do we look closely enough at the political and financial context in which the debts were calculated? Eric Monnet of the Paris School of Economics tells Tim Phillips about how our statistical methods and assumptions have evolved.You can find Eric's CEPR Discussion Paper on this subject here and his chapter, The History and Politics of Public Debt Accounting in the recent book A World of Public Debts: A Political History