Half Of World Sinking In Debt Crisis, Warns UN Chief

Half of humanity lives in countries that are forced to spend more on servicing their debt than on health and education, which is nothing less than a "development disaster," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Wednesday.

According to a new report by the UN Global Crisis Response Group, entitled 'A World of Debt', a total of 52 countries, including Pakistan, which means  almost 40 per cent of the developing world  were in "serious debt trouble", the UN chief said, backing calls for them to receive urgent fiscal relief.

Last year global public debt reached a record $92 trillion, of which developing countries shoulder 30 per cent  a "disproportionate amount", the UN chief stressed.

The secretary-general warned warned that 3.3 billion people suffer from their governments' need to prioritize debt interest payments over "essential investments" in the Sustainable Development Goals or the energy transition.

"And yet, because these unsustainable debts are concentrated in poor countries, they are not judged to pose a systemic risk to the global financial system," the UN Secretary-General added.

He insisted that the catastrophic levels of public debt in developing countries are a "systemic failure" that resulted from colonial-era inequality built into "our outdated financial system".