The History and Politics of Public Debt Accounting

Eric Monnet (1) , Blaise Truong-Loï (2)

1 EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales
2 Sciences Po - Sciences Po

At first sight, the debates on public debt that emerged from the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and the 2010–2012 European debt crisis focused mainly on drawing economic policy conclusions from the level of debt relative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), without raising many questions about the definition and accounting of public debt. Economic and moral arguments, embedded in different political repertoires,3 were called upon to discuss what is “too much debt”. This debate around numbers mostly took the quantity of debt as given. [First lines]

Domaines: Histoire; Economies et finances

Eric Monnet, Blaise Truong-Loï. The History and Politics of Public Debt Accounting. Nicolas Barreyre; Nicolas Delalande. A World of Public Debts, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.480 - 511, 2020, 9783030487966. ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-48794-2_19⟩. ⟨hal-03055816⟩