BIS Review 112/2006  5  nearly 90 percent in 2002 and is now less than 75 percent. 17 The Korean government continues to increase the proportion of its domestic currency debt in longer maturities, with the one-year-and-under segment falling from roughly one-half in 1999 to one-quarter by the end of last year. Moreover, maturity extension is not limited to emerging markets.
France and the United Kingdom, for example, issued fifty-year bonds last year. In addition to the development or extension of a yield curve worldwide, bond yields have tended to be relatively low and flat, at least in part because of the conquest of inflation.