Sovereign Debt Distress
Dozens of countries now spend more on debt service than on health or education.
Severity score
55.6
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
A wave of low and middle income countries face unsustainable debt burdens following pandemic borrowing and rising global interest rates. Restructuring processes are slow and fragmented, and the interim cost is measured in cancelled clinics, teachers and infrastructure.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
30Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
88People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
84Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
4Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
72Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.