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Module 10 - Institutional Arrangements for Public Debt

Financing governments is a complex, technical process that spans widely—from calculating how much debt is sustainable, setting a strategy that optimizes costs and risks, and laying out annual borrowing plans, down to hedging exposures, designing instruments to fit infrastructure investment, managing operational risk, and ensuring legal compliance. Behind all this, there are teams of economists, financiers, accountants, auditors, lawyers, communicators, and many others. These professionals operate within institutions whose laws, rules, norms, and cultures can make or break the final quality of public debt management. Which are those institutions? How are they designed? How do they coordinate with each other? How do they take decisions? How are they held collectively accountable? And how do they manage relationships with investors? These are some of the questions that this Module will tackle. We will look at the inner working of Public Debt Management Offices, and at their relationship with other fiscal, monetary, and financial agencies in the civil service. We will explore a well-known tool to assess the performance of those Offices (the World Bank's "DeMPA"). And we will examine ways to enhance their transparency—what they can and should report to whom.