The rise of the modern Japanese state began in the latter part of the 19th century. The government began to issue bonds in 1870. The cost of financing the war with China in 1894–95 and a subsequent buildup of its army and navy raised Japan’s public debt from 255,000,000 yen in 1890 to 506,000,000 in 1900. The war with Russia in 1904–05 cost about 1,500,000,000 yen, which was mainly raised by foreign borrowing. The financial burden of the growing empire was henceforth largely covered by taxation, so that public debt did not increase substantially from 1907 until the end of World War I. Between 1918 and 1930, however, the debt doubled. In these years a large proportion of the debt was in foreign-owned bonds. In the 1930s the government adopted heavy spending policies, mainly for military purposes, and in 1940 the debt was more than three times what it had been in 1930. Between World War II and the mid-1980s the debt had risen from 150,795,000,000 yen to more than 111,000,000,000,000.

Local governments in Japan have always been heavy borrowers. This has continued to be true in the postwar years, when prefectures, cities, towns, and villages issued bonds on a scale approaching that of the national debt. Much of the local indebtedness was used to finance large public works programs.

The absolute figures of growth in government debt exaggerate the actual growth in the debt relative to the economy as a whole. In the first place, the general price level has increased significantly over recent decades; since debt obligations are stated in fixed monetary terms, the relative magnitude goes down as the price level goes up. The general rise in prices over a period thus reduces the problems created by the debt for the government and the magnitude of the adverse effects of the interest payments on the economy. The gain occurs at the expense of the bondholders, whose real economic position is worsened by the change.

Second, the rise in national income reflecting an increase in output reduces the real significance of a fixed sum of debt for the economy. The combined effects of the real and monetary influences can be illustrated by expressing the size of the debt as a ratio to gross national product (GNP) over a period of years. In the United States the ratio fell from 129 percent in 1946 to 35 percent in 1980. It had risen again slightly by the mid-1980s. The ratio of interest payments to national income likewise fell until 1968, when it began to increase, reaching 3.8 percent in 1980. In the United Kingdom the ratio of national debt to GNP fell from 221 percent in 1952 to 136 percent in 1958. The ratio continued declining to less than 100 percent in the mid-1960s and less than 50 percent in the mid-1970s, although the size of the debt increased slightly over the period. By the early 1980s the ratio of national debt to GNP was about 43 percent.

An adequate comparison of debt burdens in various countries is difficult to make. The reported figures are by no means entirely comparable because they vary in their treatment of debt incurred for various commercial enterprises, loans from foreign countries, special issues, and the like. The relative importance of the national debt and the debt of subordinate units of government also varies, and figures for the latter are not available for many countries. Any comparison of absolute figures of debt in monetary terms is of limited value and may be very misleading because of problems of conversion to a common monetary unit. The only meaningful figure is the ratio of national debt to national income, and the significance of these figures is greatly lessened by the inaccuracy of national income data for many countries.

The oil crisis of 1973–74 and its aftermath created a new instability in world capital markets. Some countries, particularly Middle East producers with few economic activities not based on oil, gained revenues much in excess of their capacity to spend. Others, particularly in the less developed world, faced balance-of-payments problems that they found difficult to cover. Some other oil producers, such as Mexico, borrowed heavily in anticipation of rapidly increasing revenues. Those countries with surpluses of revenues over expenditures wanted to retain the liquidity of the financial assets that they acquired, and Western banks increasingly took on the role of intermediaries between the surplus and deficit countries. This led to the growth of sovereign lending—bank lending either to governments or to agencies of governments with government guarantees. While a bank lending to a private individual or company normally requires examination of the relationship of the loan to the borrower’s assets, and of the interest to income or cash flow, banks felt able to apply more relaxed criteria to sovereign loans.

By the early 1980s, however, it was apparent that for many countries sovereign debt had grown to levels at which even the interest on these loans would be met only by further borrowings. Moreover, these countries’ limited capacity to repay might be undermined by political or economic instability. The problem was particularly acute in Latin America, where U.S. banks had lent aggressively. Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico had very large external debts; smaller countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru had debt burdens that were even larger in relation to their capacity to service them. Similar difficulties were encountered in Africa and in parts of eastern Europe, particularly Poland.

The debtor countries were reluctant to repudiate their debts, which would have deprived them of access to the world capital markets and even perhaps to the world trading and payments system for a considerable time. At the same time, the lending banks were reluctant to demand repayment of their loans, which would have led to default and losses that would have wiped out a substantial portion of their reserves. Thus, there was a mutual interest in using the financial system to continue to support the indebted governments, and, paradoxically, the negotiating position of the borrowers was stronger than that of the lenders.

These were highly unstable arrangements, arousing fears that major defaults would occur. Such defaults might well set off a cumulative process of demands for repayment and defaults that would undermine not only the economies of the debtor countries but also the banking and financial systems of the countries in which the lending institutions were located. Avoiding such a crisis has demanded continued sensitive responses on the part of international financial agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund and national regulatory institutions.