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Greece Has Spent Half Its Modern Life in Default |
Of course, not all European countries are serial defaulters. The U.K., Belgium and all of the Scandinavian countries have stellar credit reports.
Rogoff spoke to Planet Money's David Kestenbaum. In an email to Kestenbaum after their interview, he pointed to a table in his recent book, This Time Is Different, as a reminder of just how often countries default on their debt.
The graphic below uses data from that table, which lists the percentage of time countries have been in default or rescheduling (a technical term explained here) on their sovereign debt.
Note: The graph is based on the years since 1800. For countries that became independent after 1800, the data starts at independence.
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source - planetmoney
