New Delhi, July 4 -- As the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) kicks off in Seville, Spain, we look at how a massive debt burden on developing countries is holding them back. As an unfit global financial architecture makes accessing finance more difficult for countries in the developing world, governments are left with the option of either servicing the debt or serving the people. Read the first, second, third and fourth parts.

The mounting debt crisis in developing countries is often portrayed as a failure of fiscal prudence or governance. But The Jubilee Report, released recently, showed that this narrative is both misleading and incomplete. The truth is, today's crisis is a systemic failure - of global...