As well as being burdened by unsustainable levels of external debt, all five economies share the misery of trying to regain lost competitive ground through internal devaluation, in which domestic costs are ground down year after year.
Should, as is likely, Japan-India external debt-for-equity swaps work well, it would take India-Japan cooperation to the next level, and provide a robust model to dozens of other nations struggling with external debt amidst budding economies that are full of promise.
But a toxic combination of external debt and collapsing confidence left the economy floundering.
Egypt, he noted, has external debt in excess of $30 billion, and an economy in freefall.
After 1989 Hungary's nascent market and parliamentary systems inherited a crisis-ridden economy with an enormous external debt and noncompetitive export sectors.
In Ireland, which has an external debt 10 times the size of the economy and bank losses that jeopardized the country's solvency, there is little sympathy for those who lent to the country's faltering banks.
Monitoring external debt is very important for the Russian economy, as Eurozone banks holding the debt fear a depreciation of assets that could lead to a financial panic.
