2 - Sovereign Debt and Neoliberalism

Summary

This Chapter provides a general definition of sovereign debt, and illustrates the trend, dating back to the 1970s, of rising global public indebtedness, including in advanced economies, to reflect on the actual role of debt in the current global economic system. It then analyses the main elements of the post-crisis reform of the legal framework for economic and fiscal policy making in the European Economic and Monetary Union (a reform linked, inter alia, to the intensified need to subject the fiscal conduct of increasingly indebted states to stricter controls), and discusses how these seem to evidence the increased neoliberalisation of EU economic governance.