This thesis examines the public and publicly guaranteed medium and long-term external debt situation of the Peruvian economy during the period 1972-1978. Two studies that aim at predicting potential debt servicing problems in a particular country-year, examined in this study, are applied to the Peruvian economy for the period following the debt reschedulings undertaken in 1968 and 1969. The results obtained from applying both econometric debt early warning systems to the Peruvian case show that, as expected, both systems overestimated the number and likelihood of actual formal reschedulings for the Peruvian economy; the debt rescheduling, in fact, took place in 1978. The faulty predictions were chiefly accounted for by the deficiencies of the debt service ratio as an indicator of possible debt servicing problems and by the balance of payments financing, which essentially, is not accounted for in both systems.