Stress Tests as a Tool to Assess the Risk of Public Expenditure on Debt Servicing Increasing at Local Government Entities

National and local government's public debt is of special interest to economic sciences. With interest rates in the EU countries now at historically low levels, there is risk of a trend change causing development expenditure to be crowded out from budgets in favour of debt servicing costs. The analysis (stress test) of the sensitivity of debt servicing costs in the local government sector in Poland to an unexpected growth of market interest rates above the values forecasted by the MoF confirms that local governments are exposed to interest rate growth risk, and consequently to the risk of their budgets incurring unplanned expenditure.