3. Public debt evaluation
Following the debt crisis in the 1980s and
1990s, there was intensive research on determinants
of a sovereign debt crisis and various
attempts to build early warning models. For
example, Reinhart (2002) found that about
84% of the countries in his sample had been in
a debt crisis following a monetary crisis.
Therefore, economic indicators used for predicting
monetary crises were also suitable for
debt crisis forecasts. In addition, Catão and
Sutton (2002) argued that the volatility of
monetary policy, fiscal policy, and exchange
rates also played an important role for triggering crisis risks. Based on Manasse and Roubini
(2005), in this section, we carry out evaluation
on Vietnam’s public debt via some measures:
(i) solvency, e.g. public debt and external public
debt as a fraction of GDP; (ii) liquidity, e.g.
short term public debt and debt service as a
fraction of foreign reserves and; (iii) volatility
of economic growth, inflation, current account
balance, and exchange rates.
Some key indicators of Vietnam’s public
debt and macroeconomic conditions are presented
in Table 4. Thresholds are taken from
Manasse and Roubini (2005). In their paper,
Manasse and Roubini (2005) employed a new
statistical method to systematically examine
warning signals before a sovereign debt crisis.
Their work showed that most crises occurred
due to: (i) insolvency (because of high levels
of debt and hyperinflation); (ii) illiquidity and;
(iii) economic recession and currency overvaluation.
Their model successfully identified
warning signals that arose before a crisis. In
other words, the probability of failure to predict
a crisis before it actually happened, the
type I errors, was very small. However, the
probability of false alarms, the type II errors,
was higher than desirable. Although there were
certain limits, the paper was relatively comprehensive
and successful in providing warning
signals before sovereign debt crises.
Therefore, thresholds given by Manasse and Roubini (2005) will be used to make a comparison
with corresponding indicators of Vietnam.
This helps obtain a more precise overview of
the current public debt situation and macroeconomic
prospects of the country.