Overcoming Original Sin

This replication package contains the data and Stata code needed for producing the figures and tables of the article “Overcoming original sin: Shedding new light on uneven progress”, published in Economic Policy, Volume 40 (122); https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiaf002. The paper examines sovereign bond markets to assess the current state of Original Sin, the inability of a country to borrow (abroad) in its own currency. It defines the key ratios and trends discussed in this literature and provides a new dataset to measure them. The dataset covers government bonds for 25 major EMEs, with quarterly data from 2005 to 2021. It combines BIS statistics on government bonds with series collected from national sources that show the amount held by foreign investors. Both parts are split into local currency and foreign currency bonds.

The emerging market sovereign bonds dataset (and possible updates in future) is also made available on the BIS website of the working paper version (https://www.bis.org/publ/work1075.htm), along with dashboards for visualisation. For background and detailed guidance, see the READ_ME file and other materials included in this replication package.