Private agents are often unable to a priori observe the government's inflationary attitude.
When the information relative to the government's type is asymmetric, a more ''inflation-adverse'' government may decide to select a debt structure different from the one it would have chosen under perfect information in order to signal its real type to private agents and therefore benefit from lower nominal interest rates. The costs associated to inflation, as well as the macroeconomic shocks and their possible correlation may strongly vary according to jurisdictions. Those dissimilarities may explain the important disparity among the observed debt structures of various countries.