Publisher:
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Departamento de Economia, Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
Central banks' liabilities are still often excluded from debt sustainability analyses, despite the enormous expansions in central banks' balance sheets that we have witnessed in recent years. In this paper, we construct a dataset that consolidates both general government and central bank balance sheets and argue that this metric allows for fairer comparisons across countries. The findings highlight the increasingly important role played by central banks in managing and altering the profile of the privately-held sovereign debt. In addition, they shed light into the impact of FX reserves accumulation and QE on reducing the debt maturity, which cannot be captered by traditional general government debt metric.