Sovereign Debt Forum and Massive Data Institute announce the launch of #PublicDebtIsPublic

The Sovereign Debt Forum and Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy announce the launch of the #PublicDebtIsPublic initiative, which will create the first centrally-collated web-based sovereign debt documentation and data commons.

“We are creating a platform of publicly sourced, authoritative information on government borrowing terms, presented in a way that is readily accessible to anyone. Our goal is to change the way governments and citizens think and talk about public debt accountability,” said Anna Gelpern, Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and International Finance. “Public debt is a promise made on behalf of the public. It should not be hard for people to know just what they promised.”

The pilot phase of the initiative is supported by a $382,609 grant to Georgetown University from the Gates Foundation.

The central part of the initiative entails making full-text sovereign debt contracts available to the public in a format that is searchable, comparable, and intelligible. The initiative will also collect and make available domestic laws and regulations for government borrowing. It will serve as a capacity-building hub for web-based courses, tutorials, legal analysis, and best practice guidance materials for governments in countries with limited resources, civil society in borrowing and lending countries, and official and private creditors with a shared source of current and authoritative information on sovereign borrowing, lending, and restructuring terms.

“We are very excited about this partnership with the Sovereign Debt Forum. The work builds on our open commons initiative focused on making public data available, discoverable, and usable by the public,” said Lisa Singh , director of the Massive Data Institute and professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Georgetown University Law Center and Queen Mary University of London are assembling a team of research assistants with legal training from different jurisdictions to support the initiative’s global scope.

The Sovereign Debt Forum is a collaboration between the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown Law and the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London, established in 2019 to advance interdisciplinary legal research in sovereign debt, to serve as a platform for convening public debt stakeholders from government, market, civil society, and academic institutions around the world, and to support capacity building in public debt management, especially in low- and middle-income countries, countries facing debt distress, and those new to international borrowing and lending.

Sovereign Debt Forum co-directors are Anna Gelpern and Rosa Lastra, Sir John Lubbock Chair in Banking Law. Sovereign Debt Forum affiliates include leading academics and practitioners in the field of sovereign debt.