Between 1999 and 2005 substantial progress was achieved in terms of debt relief for poor developing countries. Through a combination of partial debt relief and strong economic growth, key indicators of indebtedness have been reduced considerably in some of the poorest and most heavily indebted countries (HIPCs). In a few non-HIPCs individual agreements on debt cancellation have also led to considerable improvements, including Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and Nigeria in 2005. During this process the international community has failed, however, to further develop any instrument for negotiating sovereign debt difficulties if and when they occur. The HIPC and MDRI relief schemes were deliberately designed and run as one-off exercises by one out of several classes of creditors, with others only reluctantly participating, if at all. Thus, a newly over-indebted developing country today will face the same problems, which countries faced with the outbreak of the debt crisis in 1982. From the 1980s onward responses to the "Third World Debt Crisis" have mostly focussed on the need for an immediate debt cancellation. However, academics, NGOs, UN organisations and at one occasion even the IMF have been looking beyond immediate relief and into the need for a more structural solution, which would change the landscape for any sovereign who would run into payment problems in the future. The combination of extremely low global interest rates and falling commodity prices presently provides the stage for a next sovereign debt crisis which will be very similar to the one we saw in the early 1980s - and with the same results: More and more countries resort to international (and domestic) borrowing in order to fill the gaps caused by their falling (commodity export) revenues […]