Coordinating Public Debt And Monetary Management

Edited by V. Sundararajan, Peter Dattels, and Hans Blommestein, this volume outlines strategies for managing public debt, developing government securities markets, and coordinating those activities with monetary management through legal, administrative, and operational arrangements. Both transition and market economies are surveyed. The analysis draws partly on the literature on the microstructure of markets and auction systems and on selected country experiences.

In economies in transition, the development of financial markets is a common objective linking the monetary and fiscal authorities, while monetary and public debt management cannot be strictly separated. This calls for close coordination of objectives and instruments of monetary and debt management, and the development of supporting institutional and operational arrangements. Key aspects of these arrangements are surveyed.

The paper analyzes the interplay between public debt and monetary management during financial reforms, and provides suggestions on collaboration between the central bank and the treasury to achieve common objectives. It discusses monetary policy and public debt at the onset and through different phases of a financial reform and emphasizes that many objectives of public debt and monetary management are mutually supportive. It recommends the setting up of units to deal with public debt issues both at the treasury and the central bank, as well as a committee to coordinate public debt and monetary management.

This paper proposes a sovereign asset and liability management framework for analyzing the inter-relationships between debt management, fiscal and monetary policies. It illustrates the consequences of uncoordinated policy mix and extends Sargent and Wallace (1981 and 1993) by including debt management. Examples of policy games played by fiscal, monetary, and debt management authorities reinforce the importance of policy separation and coordination to prevent domination by one authority over another which could lead to inconsistent policy mix.

Recently, monetary authorities have increasingly focused on implementing policies to ensure price stability and strengthen central bank independence. Simultaneously, in the fiscal area, market development has allowed public debt managers to focus more on cost minimization. This “divorce” of monetary and debt management functions in no way lessens the need for effective coordination of monetary and fiscal policy if overall economic performance is to be optimized and maintained in the long term. This paper analyzes these issues based on a review of the relevant literature and of country experiences from an institutional and operational perspective.

This paper explores the relationship between the level and management of public debt and financial stability, and explains the channels through which the two are interlinked. It suggests that the broader implications of a debt management strategy and its implementation should be carefully analyzed by debt managers and policy makers in terms of their impact on the government's balance sheet, macroeconomic developments, and the financial system.