Comprehensive data on sovereign defaults have been hard to come by. This reflects a number of factors. An important reason is that there is no single internationally recognized definition of what constitutes a sovereign default. As a result, standards used by government borrowers and their creditors to report defaults, if they report at all, differ, and information on the various types of defaulted debt must be mined from different sources. The Bank of Canada’s Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) database—compiled in partnership with the Bank of England—helps fill these gaps through the compilation of a comprehensive country-by-country and global data set of government debt in default that applies a common standard for determining when defaults occur.