Bringing Rule of Law and Fairness to the Dysfunctional World of Sovereign Debt: A Role for Canada?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Restructuring sovereign debt has long proved challenging: There is no formal regime for sovereign insolvencies similar to those that that govern domestic bankruptcy and insolvency and attempts to create one by international treaty have been met with political resistance. Currently, sovereign debt restructuring is governed by the debt contracts themselves along with the background law in the jurisdiction in which the debt is issued. Sovereign immunity also protects most state assets from seizure. These ad hoc restructuring processes are plagued by unpredictability, however, and there are incentives for individual creditors to “hold out,” demanding full repayment of their claims and thereby undermining a necessary restructuring. Judicial decisions in recent years regarding debt governed by New York law have only strengthened the hand of these holdout creditors. While modifications to standard terms in sovereign debt contracts can go some way towards improving the current situation, this paper proposes that a superior option is the adoption of a Model Law on sovereign debt restructuring by at least one appropriate jurisdiction. Under the Model Law approach, sovereigns could issue debt in a jurisdiction that has enacted a law providing for a fair, orderly, and predictable restructuring in the event that a sovereign’s debt becomes unsustainable. Due to its well-developed financial markets and reputation for the rule of law, this paper argues that Ontario, supported by Canada, would be an appropriate jurisdiction to enact such a law. This article further argues that a collaborative legislative approach between Ontario and federal Parliament would best ensure the constitutional validity, and therefore stability, of this novel and innovative proposed regime.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".