Fair enough, let me be more specific, the actual figure for percentage of external borrowing for servicing debt is 73%. So my figure wasn't off by much. With 73% of your new external loans going to the payment of interest for the loans you already have, you are in no position to ask me
Hmm...So you won't relent and will make me do some work.
You think that a nation's financial health is encapsulated in one statistic such as % of debt servicing? Here is a snapshot of the Indian external debt that may help you understand in case you are not trolling:
- As of end of 2016, only 17% of India's external debt was owed to IMF, multilateral and bilateral agencies. So this is the real extent of India's sovereign debt.
- The rest of the debt is export credit, ECBs and NRI deposits, which have nothing to do with the government. These borrowings are either by private entities in the course of trade and investment, or in the case of NRI deposits is the money deposited by NRIs living abroad.
- In other words, whatever you included in order to come up with the figure of $485.6 b, most of it is not owed by the government but by the economy in the normal course for business. Common sense will tell you that the bigger the economic footprint of the nation, the bigger this liability. Only 17% of it is owed by the government, and the figure is coming down each quarter.
- Now coming to debt servicing. In 2015-16, only $4.771 b of India's debt servicing out of the total of $44.331 b was in lieu of external assistance received. The rest of it was, once again, primarily for either ECBs and NRI deposits.
- Which means that just over 1/10th of what you are attributing as India's debt servicing is relevant for the purposes of this discussion. The rest of it is either not owed by the government at all, or is an obligation incurred in a commercial transaction guaranteed by government, like in all such cases worldwide. So the job of servicing that debt is upon the companies, banks etc. that have incurred this liability.
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To summarize, only 17% of what you claim to be India's external debt is owed by the government, and only 1/10 of what you claim to be India's debt servicing payments are incurred by the government. It is not our concern as to how private entities service their debt.
And finally, before you start delving into Pakistan's statistics to find some kind of false equivalence (if that is your intention), please remember this - the Pakistan government was so desperate to receive an IMF tranche that the zero quarterly limit was adjusted for a 24 hr period to meet the ceiling. Such a government can manipulate anything to get hold of money to stay afloat.
So why does the IMF keep giving money to an insolvent state? The reason, as in most such cases, is obvious. One particular tranche of $500 million from the IMF, $200 million were tunneled directly into a Swiss project for water supply. So either the money is used to service debt, or is handed over to IMF approved companies, thereby ending up back in the pockets of the same country giving the debt.
So you give a loan with one hand, and take it away with another, while the debtor's obligation remains the same. Instead of trolling PDF to save your country's pride, maybe you should consider petitioning your government to stop this open loot.