Figure 1.  Performance of Sovereign Debt for selected European countries and the US [7].

[7] http://www.worldbank.org/ 

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Figure 1 illustrates the evolution in sovereign debt for selected European countries and the US -- from 1995-2011 (where included).  It is worth noting that only France and Germany showed any appreciable decline in rate of accumulation of this debt. 

Figure 2 presents the rate at which this sovereign debt changes (year-to-year) for the same countries.  The debt behaves as follows:

                          D(Y) = D(Y-1) [ 1 + R(Y)/100]

Here, D(Y) specifies the sovereign debt in the Yth year. As Figure 1 indicates, the starting year is somewhat country dependent due to the availability of data for the country in question.

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Figure 2.  Calculated rate of change of sovereign debt (%) [7].