Today’s landscape of development finance is marked by the growing debt vulnerabilities of low- and middle-income countries. The post-2008 financial crisis era is characterized by a rapid rise in lending to them, fueled by factors including buoyant commodity prices, quantitative easing, and low interest rates in high-income countries. With increased access to international capital markets, many low- and middle-income countries shifted away from traditional sources of financing and experienced a sharp rise in external debt, raising new concerns about sustainability. Among the low- and middle-income countries, several IDA-only countries have been recording the highest increases in external debt since the 2008 crisis. By the end of 2018, IDA-only countries had accumulated a total of $387 billion external debt stock, more than double the level of a decade earlier