G20 Insights endorses Prof Avgouleas and Ayadi proposal to augment debt transparency
Mon 30 November 2020
Professors Emilios Avgouleas, Chair of International Banking Law and Finance at Edinburgh Law School, alongside Rym Ayadi, Chair of the Euro-Mediterranean Network for Economic Studies, have put forward a proposal to augment sovereign debt transparency and governance through the establishment of a global sovereign debt platform.
Published in October 2020, the proposal comes in response to the economic and social cohesion of poorer nations, especially in Africa, being badly undermined by the Covid-19 pandemic and rising global concerns about debt unsustainability.
This proposal has now been endorsed by the G20 Insights which published on 29 November the paper by Professors Emilios Avgouleas and Rym Ayadi on Implementing a tech-driven sovereign debt transparency initiative, essentially upholding their proposal. The G20 (or Group of Twenty) is an international forum for the governments and central bank governors from 19 countries and the European Union (EU) and is the premium forum for International Economic Cooperation.
The G20 Insights only carries proposals of high quality, novelty and implementability from distinguished experts. The platform offers policy proposals to the G20 decision makers which are either 'recommendations' or 'visions'. The proposal of Avgouleas and Ayadi has been endorsed as a 'recommendation'.
In their paper, Professors Avgouleas and Ayadi explain how a global digital repository for sovereign debt powered by blockchain technology to secure data integrity can become a weapon for stakeholders and civil society to augment sovereign debt transparency and governance and battle corruption. Secondary benefits include faster and more efficient debt restructurings, alignment of incentives, and, to some extent, prevention of sovereign debt crises.
Further to the endorsement of their proposal by the G20 Insights, the authors presented their paper to a specially convened session of the Sovereign Debt Forum of the Financial Markets Law Committee (operating under the auspices of the Bank of England) on 30 November 2020 before leading policy-makers and sovereign debt experts from City law firms, asset managers, and the Institute of International Finance.