Zambia

Official risk classification

The CRC scores the likelihood a country services its external debt on an eight-step scale, from 0 to 7, and sets the minimum premiums the OECD Arrangement participants charge on officially supported export credit. Categories 1 to 7 are the risk ladder (1 lowest, 7 highest). Category 0, and the blank status the OECD has used for these countries since 2013, mark high-income OECD and high-income euro-area economies that are exempt because their credit is priced on market terms. An exempt status is unclassified by design, not a data gap and not a zero-risk rating.

Source: OECD, Country Risk Classifications of the Participants to the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits OECD CRC, free reuse with attribution. Category is an ordinal 0-7 risk step, not a probability; 0 and blank denote exemption. Methodology

Debt trajectory, 1980 onward

Debt to GDP by perimeter, observed years only (no IMF forecast years). Central-government debt is mechanically below general government (it excludes state, local and social-security debt). Shaded bands are sovereign-debt crisis years.

Source: IMF Global Debt Database (Mbaye, Moreno-Badia & Chae, IMF WP/18/111) | IMF World Economic Outlook Debt is % of GDP; crisis-year shading from the sovereign-debt chronologies. Methodology

Debt profile

External debt (World Bank IDS)

External debt owed to non-residents, from the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics, which covers low- and middle-income economies only (Zambia is classified Lower middle income). Dollar figures are current US dollars; ratio figures are percentages, as labelled. This is external debt in USD, a different measure from the government debt-to-GDP ratios above; do not compare the two directly.

Source: World Bank International Debt Statistics (IDS) World Bank IDS, CC BY 4.0. Units: current US dollars (.CD series) and percent (.ZS series); repayment-schedule years beyond 2024 excluded. Methodology

Debt in default (BoC-BoE CRAG)

Stock of Zambia’s government debt in default in 2024, from the Bank of Canada–Bank of England Sovereign Default Database, broken down by creditor class. The external total is $10.44B (current US dollars, excluding domestic arrears, matching the database’s published headline). A further $1.88B of domestic (fiscal) arrears is tracked separately and is not included in that total.

In default (external) for 50 distinct years between 1975 and 2024. Peak external default stock: $11.28B.

Source: BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database 2025 (Beers, Ndukwe & Berry, Bank of Canada SAN 2025-24) BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database, Bank of Canada terms (free use with attribution). Units: current US dollars; total excludes domestic arrears. Methodology

Sovereign-debt crisis history

Each episode with the government debt-to-GDP ratio in its start year, where a reading exists. Episode dates use the same merge as the crisis atlas (consecutive crisis years bridged across gaps of up to two years).

• 1983–19941980–1999
  Debt at start: 17.1% (Central govt (IMF GDD))episode →

Source: Global Macro Database 2026_06 (Müller, Xu, Lehbib & Chen 2025) | Reinhart-Rogoff via HBS BFFS | Laeven & Valencia (2020) Methodology

Restructuring history and creditor losses

Every recorded Zambia sovereign-debt restructuring and the creditor loss (“haircut”) it imposed. The preferred haircut is the present-value measure (Sturzenegger–Zettelmeyer methodology); the face-value column is the headline principal write-down. Amounts restructured are in current US dollars. A crisis link appears where the restructuring year falls inside one of the sovereign-debt crisis episodes above.

Source: Cruces & Trebesch (2013), AEJ: Macro; updated in Graf von Luckner, Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch (2024), IMF Economic Review Kiel Institute / Trebesch sovereign-haircut database, research use with citation. Haircut and face-value figures are percentages; debt restructured is current US dollars. Methodology

Reading this profile

• Debt levels mix perimeters. The headline and debt-at-start figures fall back through IMF general government, then central government, then WEO gross debt, then (before 1980) the GMD historical series. Central-government readings understate the general-government ratio.
• Crisis flags end in 2016 (Reinhart-Rogoff) and 2017 (GMD, Laeven-Valencia), while debt runs to 2024. “Years since last crisis” and the absence of recent crises reflect where the sources stop, not a guarantee of calm.
• Debt level is a weak predictor of default on its own; see the methodology for the debt-intolerance evidence and the full construction.