Labour urged to lead global debt relief effort as repayment costs soar

Campaigners are urging Labour to lead the charge for global debt relief in 2025 as new analysis shows lower-income countries spent 15% of their revenue on repayments this year - the highest level for three decades.

- Heather Stewart

Calculations by the charity Debt Justice, based on data from the World Bank, show repayments from poorer countries bottomed out at 4.4% of income in 2011 but have since trebled.

"High debt payments are preventing the public spending needed to cut poverty and tackle the climate emergency," said Debt Justice's policy director, Tim Jones.

Gideon Rabinowitz, the director of policy and advocacy at Bond, the anti-poverty coalition, said: "Lower-income countries are being crushed by unsustainable debt, therefore debt cancellation must be on the international agenda next year. This debt crisis is a symptom of a broken global financial system which reproduces this recurring cycle of debt crises."

Among the countries facing the highest repayments as a share of income in 2024 were Angola (65%), Laos (52%), Pakistan (43%) and Egypt (43%). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently agreed a fresh $7bn loan to Pakistan - the latest of a string of bailouts - despite warning that it faced "high risks and a narrow path" to debt sustainability.