Global agencies to work on improving availability of debt data

Tokyo

LEADING economists are warning increasingly of the dangers posed by a global build-up of debt that has occurred, especially in emerging economies, and the debt "mountain" could be even bigger than feared because not all of it is logged in official data.

Much of the debt build-up in Asia and elsewhere has taken the form of foreign currency borrowing, taking advantage of low US dollar interest rates, and memories are still fresh of how severely exposed such borrowing left the region at the time of the Asian financial crisis.