Sovereign haircuts / ETH

Ethiopia

One concluded restructuring, settled in 1996. It cost creditors 92.0% of the present value of their claim, 6 years after the default that began in 1990.

Restructurings

92.0%

Median present-value haircut

92.0%

Worst present-value haircut

0 of 1

Cut face value by zero

$350M

Debt treated (2020 $)

Every restructuring

Two measures of the same deals, never combined. The present-value haircut discounts what creditors got against what they were owed; the face-value reduction counts only principal written off.

Present-value haircutFace-value reduction

Default	Settled	Years to settle	Present-value haircut	Face-value reduction	Debt treated (2020 $)	Source
1990	1996	6	92.0%	92.0%	$350M	Cruces and Trebesch (2013)

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch (2022), Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo | Cruces & Trebesch (2013), Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts | Asonuma & Trebesch (2016) Debt treated is the amount restructured, deflated to constant 2020 US dollars in the source file. A negative haircut means the new instruments were worth more than the old claim. Methodology

Bond prices

0 of 1 Ethiopia restructuring episode have Waterloo prices during the restructuring interval

The haircut file dates episodes by year. Waterloo matches them by country code and plots a padded window from one year before default through one year after settlement.

The public Waterloo bond panel in this repo runs from Jan 1, 1822 to Dec 1, 1980. This selector uses price only, never pbid or pask, and shows one line per bond from one year before default to one year after settlement. The author README defines price as “bond price in GBP and USD”; it does not document normalization to face value. Across all 329 haircut episodes, 111 have no Waterloo country-code match and 177 start after Dec 1, 1980. Those two counts overlap. 1 of 1 episode starts after the panel ends. 1 episode has no Waterloo country-code match.

Episode

Selected episode: default 1990, settled 1996, case 137, spell ETH_1990-1996. Window: Jan 1, 1989 to Dec 31, 1997.

The Waterloo panel has no country code match for Ethiopia (1990-1996), so this episode cannot be plotted from that dataset. The absence is coverage, not a zero price.

Ethiopia has restructuring episodes on this page, but none has a covered Waterloo price observation inside its restructuring interval in the public parquet bundled with this repo.

Each option includes its case id and default-spell id. The chart includes every priced bond for that country in the window, so it does not identify bonds belonging to the selected restructuring. The one-year padding is a display window, one year either side; an editorial choice rather than a source-defined threshold. It uses waterloo_bonds.price only; pbid and pask are not averaged into it. The author README defines price as “bond price in GBP and USD” and does not document face-value normalization. GBP and USD observations use separate labelled panels and y-axes. Of the 329 episodes in the haircut file, 111 have no Waterloo country-code match and 177 start after 1980-12-01; these counts overlap. Later episodes show an absence message rather than an implied zero.

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch, Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo (bond-price panel) | Harvard Dataverse, Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo Methodology

Default spells

Spell	From	To	Years	Restructurings
ETH_1990-1996	1990	1996	7	1

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch (2022), Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo | Cruces & Trebesch (2013), Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts | Asonuma & Trebesch (2016) Duration counts both endpoints. The spells table also carries a cumulative-haircut column; it is not published here because it does not reconcile with the per-episode haircuts, see the methodology. Methodology

The Cruces-Trebesch record: a third measure and the discount rate

The Cruces-Trebesch file carries 1 restructuring here, and adds the market haircut (the new instruments against the face value of the old claim, undiscounted) and the exit yield used to do the discounting. The deal label is the file’s own and is finer than the country: it names the instrument class the deal covered. The two files were assembled separately, so a deal here need not line up one-to-one with a row above.

Deal	Date	Present value	Market	Face value	Exit yield	Structure	Data quality
Ethiopia	1996-01-01	92.0%	92.0%	92.0%	16.0%	buyback	3 / 5

Source: Cruces & Trebesch, haircut dataset (2014 update) Data quality is the file's own 1-to-5 index of how well the deal terms are documented. Methodology

Debt still in default

$16.46B across 7 creditor classes in 2024. A haircut can only be measured once a restructuring concludes, so any of this that is still being negotiated is by construction absent from the tables above.

Creditor class	In default, 2024
China (official)	$5.38B
Local-currency debt	$5.30B
Foreign-currency bank loans	$2.06B
Paris Club (bilateral official)	$2.00B
Foreign-currency bonds	$1.13B
Other official creditors	$552.0M
Other private creditors	$32.0M

Source: Bank of Canada-Bank of England Sovereign Default Database (CRAG) Bank of Canada terms (attribution). Includes domestic arrears, so it is not comparable with the debt-treated column above. Methodology

Restructurings with Chinese creditors

1 restructuring with a Chinese creditor is recorded here. No haircut is attached to any of them, so they cannot be placed on the scale above; the file records only whether face value or the interest rate was cut.

Year	Type	Creditor	Terms
2018	Debt rescheduling only	China Ex-Im Bank	China Ex-Im Bank grants a 20-year maturity extension on its commercial loan for the Addis-Djibouti railway.

Source: Horn, Reinhart & Trebesch, China's overseas lending and debt restructurings Methodology

Methodology, the measures, and what this data cannot tell you