Paris Club Sovereign Debt Restructuring Agreements, 1956–2026

Paris Club agreements from 1956 to April 2026 cover 543 debt restructuring deals involving 102 debtor countries and approximately USD $863 billion in treated debt. The dataset was constructed by Jochem van der Zaag through systematic web scraping and manual validation of the Paris Club's official website, providing a significant update to a 2016 predecessor. It includes agreement-level metadata such as debtor and creditor countries, monetary amounts, treatment terms, and supporting documentation links.

Use Cases

• Analyzing trends in sovereign debt treatment terms and amounts over seven decades.
• Modeling the outcomes of debt restructuring based on debtor country and creditor participation.
• Studying the impact of financial crises, such as COVID-19, on official debt negotiations.
• Mapping the network of debtor-creditor relationships in international finance.

Strengths

• Covers a long temporal range from 1956 to 2026, including post-COVID-19 agreements.
• Includes 543 agreements with approximately USD $863 billion in treated debt.
• Provides multiple file formats (Excel and CSV) with both machine-readable and human-readable layouts.
• Source code and methodology documentation are hosted on GitHub for reproducibility.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific analytical tasks.

Provenance

Source

Paris Club official website (clubdeparis.org)

Collection Method

Systematic web scraping, reverse-engineering, and manual cleaning and validation.

Time Range

1956 to April 2026

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-30 21:21:46.

Geography

Global, covering 102 debtor countries