Bangkok should ask what the debt was for
As the IMF and the World Bank meet in Bangkok, developing nations are paying their creditors more than they receive. The harder question is what any of it has bought.
- $741bnmore paid on external debt than received in new financing, 2022 to 2024
- $8.9tnexternal debt of low- and middle-income countries, 2024, a record
- $921bnnet interest paid by developing countries on public debt, 2024
- 3.4bnpeople in countries that spend more on interest than on health or education
This week the world’s finance ministers and central bankers gather in Bangkok for the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, from 12 to 18 October. The numbers they bring with them are stark. Between 2022 and 2024, developing countries paid $741 billion more in principal and interest on their external debt than they received in new financing, the widest gap in at least fifty years.
The debate will turn, as it always does, on sustainability: can these nations keep paying? It is a necessary question, and the wrong one to ask first. Whether a debt can be carried depends on what it was used for. A loan that builds a grid that powers a factory repays itself. A loan that rolls over last year’s loan buys only time.
Ministries report their liabilities to the cent and their assets barely at all. Land, minerals, coastline, institutions and people rarely appear on a national balance sheet, so a nation borrows as if it owned nothing. Set the same debt against the cost of a dignified floor for every citizen, and much of it looks less like a burden than a misallocation.
Three changes that would move the floor
- Tie every new borrowing to a standard. Each facility names the water connections, school places or clinics it will deliver, and reports against them.
- Price refinancing by results. Chile’s sustainability-linked bond and the World Bank’s outcome bonds have shown that investors will accept a return that answers to targets.
- Put the assets on the ledger. A nation that counts what it owns can borrow against it, on better terms, and for longer.
None of this requires a new institution. It requires the existing ones to ask a second question after the first: not only whether a nation can pay, but whether its people are better off for the borrowing.
The measure of Bangkok will not be the size of the next package. It will be whether, a year from now, more citizens stand above the floor.
Sources: World Bank, International Debt Report 2025 · UNCTAD, A World of Debt 2025 · IMF, 2026 Annual Meetings