The City Creditworthiness Initiative seeks to address the knowledge gap that exists regarding local government borrowing in developing countries. The Local Government Borrowing Database (LGBD) contains data on the debt of local governments in developing countries, both at an aggregated country basis and an individual entity level.  The database contains:

• Country-level data: quantitative indicators that describe in aggregate local government borrowing in developing countries
• City-level data: quantitative indicators that describe borrowing (including debt securities issuances) in a subset of individual local governments
• Legal & regulatory data: a dataset of key enabling environment indicators for local government borrowing
• Country profiles: qualitative briefs that describe the legal and regulatory enabling environment & borrowing experience/access of local governments in developing countries

The database will be launched with 10 countries and 30 cities researched, expanding to 40 countries and 120 cities with annual updates. The base year of collection for data is 2016. LGBD is a best-effort initiative to gather data on local government borrowing and relies primarily on desk research from available official public sources. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data or make any representations regarding it beyond its status as product of national and/or local government sources as described in the metadata.  Any findings, interpretations and conclusions that may be expressed in the LGBD do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank, the Executive Directors of the World Bank Board or the governments they represent. 

Users should be aware of the difference between the LGBD - which collates data from external sources that are not product of the World Bank Group -  and official World Bank initiatives in this space (such as International Debt Statistics and the Debtor Reporting System), which contain World Bank-produced data not available elsewhere.  You can read our methodology here. We welcome any questions/comments. Contact us at: cci_info@citycred.org