The Wall Street Journal quotes Eric LeCompte on a new debt framework in efforts to ensure China's participation in a debt restructuring that could resolve Zambia's default. Read an excerpt below, and click here for the full story.
Africa’s First Pandemic Default Tests New Effort to Ease Debt From China
A new framework to resolve debt crises in developing countries, meant to ensure that Chinese and private creditors share the burden of providing relief, faces a key test after Zambia became the first African nation to default during the coronavirus pandemic.
Finance ministers from the Group of 20 major economies said Nov. 13 that they had come up with a new process for restructuring the debts of the world’s poorest countries, which now owe billions of dollars to Chinese state-owned lenders and Western fund managers that snapped up their dollar-denominated bonds in the years before the pandemic.
Under this common framework, which G-20 officials lauded as a breakthrough after months of resistance from Beijing, Chinese lenders will participate in debt restructurings alongside rich, mostly Western nations. Private creditors will also be asked to provide relief on similar terms.
“The framework was designed for the problems Zambia is now facing,” said Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA, a nongovernmental organization that lobbies for poor-country debt relief.
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