Concepts of Modernization: Management of Public Debt

Abstract

High or excessive level of public debt results in permanent difficulties for public finance, especially: tension in state budget (in the consequence of high servicing costs), necessity of activation of reserves, limitation in some expenditures. Moreover, it deteriorates conditions of operating of economy, as a result of: reduction of credit, increase of taxation, decrease of rating (causing of increase of interest rates). High, subcrisis level of debt requires effective – optimal – system of management and strategy. The debt management consists of: determining of debt level and structure, accordingly to the type of instruments and creditors and financial flows resulting from the debt. The main purpose of the management is minimization of servicing costs, under constraints for risk level, especially interest rate, and satisfying of conditions about required debt features. Debt strategy takes into account macroeconomic targets and conditions; the basic is maximization of welfare. Realization of purposes of debt management is the complex decision problem – it requires formulation of coherent set of optimization problems. They can be solved with a use of mathe-matical programming methods and theory of games. Formulation of numerical form of optimization problems require application of analytic, diagnostic and forecasting methods, based on statistics, econometrics and computational intelligence. Important part of debt optimization is also experts’ component. In the author opinion it is not possible to guarantee actual optimization of debt management and strategy without application of the mentioned above methodology. Lack of optimality indicates significant losses for the public finance, especially as a result of excessive servicing costs (their level approach the level of 50 milliards of Polish zlotys).