Developing countries are often unable to repay interests or installments on the principal of international loans in uniform amounts with regular periodicity. Foreign exchange problems, or internal liquidity crises may intervene, but mechanisms to adjust payments due are of an ad hoc nature. In the United Nations system uniform payments of assessments suffer from these and from political variables.
Following the 1990 reunification, which fulfilled terms of a 1953 creditor's accord, the German government began to resume payments on its pre-World War II foreign debt of an estimated £85 million.