Welcome to the Public Debt Management Practice (PDM Practice) web site – the site for debt management professionals!
Although the importance of debt management has been recognized for centuries – the first “independent” debt management office was created in Sweden in 1789 and the creation of the Bank of England (which also has its origins in the management of debt) was setup even earlier in 1694 – it is surprising that PDM is still not recognized as a discipline and a profession in its own right. As of now, there is no professional body of public debt managers (as we have for say accountants) and one cannot study for an accredited degree in public debt management.
Perhaps the reason lies in the multi-disciplinary nature of public debt management, which encompasses elements from economics, finance, law, IT etc. However, it is a situation that we think needs to change. It is often mentioned that public debt is one of the biggest financial portfolio of a country. Public debt managers will be aware of the complexity of this portfolio in terms of the different types of debt instruments that it is comprised of, its currency composition, interest rate structure etc. and the associated risks that this entails. The socio-economic consequences of poor debt management hardly need to be reiterated.
In addition to our core objective of developing governments’ capacity for managing public debt by offering high quality and affordable consultancy services as well as training, PDM Practice would like to contribute towards the recognition of debt management as a discipline and a profession. A tall order you might think but one which we think is not impossible to achieve if debt managers themselves start realizing the importance of their work and other organisations involved in public debt management the idea.
PDM Practice’s own contribution will take three forms:
First, we will advocate for better recognition of debt management professionals. We chose to call ourselves “a Practice” for the word means “actively pursue or be engaged in a particular profession or occupation”. But more importantly though, we intend to start a discussion on the issue in various forums of interest to public debt managers.
Secondly, we are partnering with the University of Mauritius to offer an Executive Master in Public Debt Management. This project is on-going and you can find out more on the project’s dedicated web site at: http://sites.uom.ac.mu/empdm/
Thirdly, in time, we will be offering a set of resources through this web site which we hope, will be useful to debt managers. More on this later.
We hope you will enjoy this new web site on public debt management. Please email us your views and suggestions.