Sovereign indebtedness in low- and middle-income countries has risen sharply since the mid- 2010s, reversing the favourable dynamics that followed the debt-relief initiatives in the first decade of the century. This change has primarily been driven by the conventional arithmetic of debt in which rising real interest rates relative to the underlying growth rate of the economy, combined with a weakening of the primary fiscal balance, renders high levels of sovereign borrowing unsustainable, pushing a number of countries to the edge of, or into, sovereign default. […]