تداعيات جائحة كوفيد-19 على الدين العام في الدول العربي

Abstract EN

This paper used the famous three-gaps model and the public debt dynamic equation to study the implications of strong external shock on Arab economies.

Non-oil Arab countries are experiencing a persistent structural internal and external imbalances, which negatively impacted their resource gap, which in turn led to a noticeable increase in the public debt to a level equivalent to GDP in 2018, which indicates potential difficulty of debt sustainability in the future.

As for Arab oil-producing countries, their resources balance experienced a sharp decline after 2014 that was translated into internal and external deficits.

This fragile situation and the decline in economic growth, especially in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, is expected to exacerbate the financial situation further and leads to an increase of Arab public debt by 22 percentage points of Arab GDP between 2019 and 2021.