Fiscal Insurance and Debt Management in OECD Economies

Assuming the role of debt management is to provide hedging against fiscal shocks we consider: (i) what indicators can be used to assess the performance of debt management? (ii) how well historical debt management policies have performed (iii) how performance is affected by variations in debt issuance, using OECD data between 1970 and 2000. We propose performance indicators for debt management, which we evaluate using Monte Carlo analysis. Those based on the relative persistence of debt perform best. There is only limited evidence that debt management has helped insulate policy against unexpected fiscal shocks. The degree of fiscal insurance achieved is not well connected to cross-country variations in debt issuance patterns.

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