The ability to borrow is important for government survival. Governments routinely resort to policies that privilege their own debt on financial markets, exploiting their dual role as borrowers and regulators. We label such policies as borrowing privileges. These borrowing privileges nudge investors to hold the government’s own debt. They share similarities with prudential regulation, but skew the market in favor of the government’s debt; and they share similarities with financial repression, but are less severe and thus consistent with the growth of financial markets. Introducing the first systematic dataset documenting the use of such policies across countries and over time, we demonstrate that governments implement borrowing privileges when their interactions with the global economy heighten fiscal needs: when borrowing costs indicate tightened access to credit, when trade liberalization undercuts revenue, and where fixed exchange rates increase the value of fiscal space. Despite the mobility of financial assets and constraints from global markets, governments retain latitude in regulating domestic markets to their own fiscal benefit.

借贷能力对于政府的生存很重要。各国政府经常利用其作为借款人和监管者的双重角色，采取在金融市场上给予本国债务特权的政策。我们将此类政策称为借贷特权。这些借贷特权促使投资者持有政府自己的债务。它们与审慎监管有相似之处，但使市场偏向于政府债务；它们与金融抑制有相似之处，但不太严重，因此与金融市场的增长一致。我们引入了第一个记录各国长期使用此类政策的系统数据集，证明政府在与全球经济的互动增加财政需求时实施借贷特权：当借贷成本表明信贷渠道收紧时，当贸易自由化削弱收入时，固定汇率会增加财政空间的价值。尽管金融资产具有流动性并受到全球市场的限制，但各国政府仍保留为了自身财政利益而监管国内市场的自由度。