Day: June 22, 2023

New York, June 22, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — New research supported by the Open Society Foundations shows that increasing delays in resolving sovereign debt crises in some of the world’s poorest countries are significantly adding to the human cost of defaults—cutting economic growth, reducing life-expectancy, and worsening child mortality rates.

The analysis, The Human Costs of the Failing Global Debt System, builds on research published last year that showed how going into default leads to economic and human damage that worsens over subsequent years.

Sovereign debt defaults occur when countries fail to pay their debts on time. This can be interest or principal payments to domestic or international creditors. This typically forces a renegotiation of lending terms. The research looked at data from 131 sovereign debt defaults around the world since 1900.

The new paper’s authors, economists Clemens Graf von Luckner and Juan P. Farah-Yacoub, conclude that, in addition, the longer it takes a country to reach a new agreement with its creditors, the greater the increase in human costs:

• When a country’s debt crisis is resolved in less than three years, infant mortality ten years after a default is declared as 2.2 percentage points higher than would have been expected. But when the default continues for more than three years, the difference rises to a staggering 11.4 percentage points higher.
• For the countries studied, on average, life expectancy ten years after default drops by more than one year relative to where it would have been without the default.
• In addition, the shortfall in the rate of increase in real economic output per capita (against what it could have been without default), jumps by 2.5 percentage points in the first year of default, against what it would have been had there been no default. It then continues to grow by 1.5 percentage point on average each year thereafter. Over a decade the gap grows to roughly 14.5 percentage points.

The findings underline the grave damage being caused by the failure of the existing global financial system to deliver prompt resolution to countries in default due in part to the involvement of an increasingly complex mix of creditors—including international financial institutions such as development banks, commercial banks, sovereign lenders including China, and private commercial creditors.

The report also highlights the case of Zambia, which defaulted on its external debt in November 2020 under the economic strains of the Covid pandemic. It has yet to secure a comprehensive debt agreement among all of its public and private creditors and the International Monetary Fund, with its total debt now estimated at over $18 billion.

The authors of this new report calculated that, based on a calculation using Zambia’s birth rates in 2016, the country’s current debt default would result in an additional 3,079 annual deaths of infants before their first birthdays by the year 2030, if the default is prolonged further.

Mark Malloch-Brown, president of the Open Society Foundations, said: “The findings here starkly illustrate how a dysfunctional global financial system is causing tragic but entirely avoidable human suffering. The leaders meeting in Paris need to commit to the urgent reforms the world needs to face both deepening poverty and the worsening climate crisis.”

The Open Society Foundations, together with a broad range of civil society groups, are pushing for the leaders gathered at the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris to commit to policies that will significantly reform the international debt restructuring process to allow for a just and sustainable resolution to a country’s default delivered in a timely manner. These steps include:

1. States establishing a clear process with firm timetables for getting agreement to “cure” defaults—no more three years in limbo like Zambia.
2. The IMF must more aggressively use its authority to “lend into arrears”—which means they can launch their funding support program to indebted countries even if some creditors refuse to accept new debt relief terms. These hold out creditors loans would not get paid, but everyone else participating does.
3. Private creditors (including sovereign bond holders) should not be allowed to refuse to accept debt settlements that creditor countries agree to, and then expect to be paid with the benefits of that relief, or to use the courts to get full repayment. In the United States, the New York State legislature has before it legislation that would end this practice.
4. The International Financial Institutions need significantly more funding from the Global North to give them the resources needed to properly fund recovery from defaults and allow the economic growth needed to avoid defaults in the future.

Office of Communications
Open Society Foundations 
(212) 548-0378
media@opensocietyfoundations.org

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 8862959

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 22, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — FreedomPay, a global leader in Next Level Commerce, announces a partnership with Visa to integrate Visa’s network tokenization capabilities within FreedomPay’s global identity and tokenization framework. The true omnichannel global tokenization product will provide network tokens across card brands, helping to keep merchants compliant with cross-border and in-region data and privacy regulations, while helping merchants qualify for lower interchange rates for certain Visa network tokenized transactions.

“With the growing number of connected devices, changing consumer behaviors and shifting privacy regulations, the benefits of utilizing network tokens are many. Using the Visa Acceptance Platform, Visa has the scale and flexibility to seamlessly provision them for FreedomPay’s clients around the globe, helping to improve customer experience, improve authorization rates and reduce fraud,” said Bill Dobbins, SVP, Head of Acquiring and Enablement at Visa.

Network tokenization will also help streamline the customer journey, providing a seamless experience across borders and merchant locations. The new capabilities will be integrated into FreedomPay’s larger identity suite, offering a 360-degree view of the customer to the merchant, creating a more personalized checkout experience through data-driven loyalty and incentives.

“FreedomPay is trusted by the largest brands across hospitality, retail, F&B and more to provide repeatable and scalable next level solutions for security, data management and compliance, and to create a personalized and seamless customer journey around the globe,” said David Knowlton, CTO at FreedomPay. “By partnering with Visa for network tokenization, FreedomPay will provide merchants with more flexibility and geographic coverage, including in harder-to-access regions, when managing customer and card data.”

Additional features will also be supported without any changes to the merchant’s systems such as supporting card on file use cases with digital wallet taps as well as token life cycle management.

About FreedomPay

FreedomPay’s Next Level Commerce platform transforms existing payment systems and processes from legacy to leading edge and enables merchants to unleash the power of pay. As the premier choice for many of the largest companies across the globe in retail, hospitality, lodging, gaming, sports and entertainment, foodservice, education, healthcare and financial services, FreedomPay’s technology has been purposely built to deliver rock solid performance in the highly complex environment of global commerce.

The company maintains a world-class security environment and was first to earn the coveted validation by the PCI Security Standards Council against Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE/EMV) standard in North America. FreedomPay’s robust solutions across payments, security, identity, and data analytics are available in-store, online and on-mobile and are supported by rapid API adoption. The award winning FreedomPay Commerce Platform operates on a single, unified technology stack across multiple continents allowing enterprises to deliver an innovative Next Level experience on a global scale. www.freedompay.com

Jennifer Tayebi
Hill+Knowlton Strategies for FreedomPay
+1 734 395 0780
jennifer.tayebi@hkstrategies.com

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 8862332