Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the...
This paper empirically examines South Africa’s fiscal sustainability through a Markov-switching model which utilizes quarterly datasets for the period from 1960 to 2019. The results show that public debt responds positively, demonstrating a...
Tony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, debt crises have plagued low-, middle-, and high-income countries at various times. Indebted countries have generally addressed balance of payments crises either by (a) obtaining International...
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have lofty expectations regarding the impact of official development aid. Are these expectations valid? This paper surveys the literature on aid and growth. It finds that practically all aid studies since the...
This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on public sector fiscal behaviour in Côte d’Ivoire. A special interest is the relationship between aid, debt servicing and debt, given that Côte d’Ivoire is a highly indebted country. The theoretical...
This paper examines the role of financial frictions in the public debt–growth nexus, documenting that a public debt shock has different macro-financial implications dependent on the state of financial markets in South Africa. A non-linear vector...
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)’s public debt burden remains a challenge to development. Key drivers of public debt include large-scale financing of infrastructure development, adverse impact of multiple shocks including COVID-19 pandemic, maturity...
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
In June 1998, Guinea-Bissau was thrown into conflict by a military revolt. This led to 11 months of fighting, extensive loss of life, and the displacement of up to a third of the country's population. This paper discusses the political economy of the...
Three changes in conditionality of loans are proposed in this study, in order to improve the relations between developing country borrowers and international lending agencies, and make the international cooperative effort at development and stability...
The classical transfer problem is studied in an overlapping generations framework, where the transfer is from a creditor country to a debtor country. A distinction is made between tax-financed and debt-financed transfers on the one hand, and between...
Tony Addison With six months remaining till the end of 2011, it’s time to take a peek into the near future. What can we expect? John Kenneth Galbraith...
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major...
The main theme of this manuscript is to demonstrate that growth in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries has continued to decline under the burden of the foreign debt over the last fifteen years. After a decade of painful lost growth, the continent...
The aim of this paper is to raise a few open questions and to bring to light some mismatches between existing theories and the evidence. (1) It is shown that many standard international debt models unwittingly require some agents to behave...
The abundance of private capital flows confronts many emerging-market authorities with a transfer problem. They must decide whether to accept or resist the net capital inflow, or how much to accept and how much to resist. This paper aims at assisting...
The paper explores the impact of a binding external debt-servicing constraint on the sectoral composition of government expenditures in the economies of Africa, where this constraint has traditionally been most prevalent. Applying seemingly unrelated...
The paper examines the main issues involved in translating domestic bankruptcy procedures to the sovereign context. It considers some of the principles by which domestic bankruptcy procedures operate, and the extent to which they apply to...
Sustainable development is a long-term process, and as such must be examined carefully. Development implies structural changes of many different types, ranging from purely economic aspects to those affecting the personal circumstances of people...
Kenya’s external debt has continued to swell over the years, and despite the country meeting its debt commitment through regular servicing, this has been done at the expense of key social services such as health, education, water and sanitation...
This study critically reviews the education sector in Kenya and the challenges facing the sector in achieving universal primary schooling. The study argues that the introduction of cost-sharing system in Kenya has resulted in high dropout and...
This paper attempts to answer the following question: If the HIPC Initiative is fully successful and managed to write-off all debt that is owed by Africa, will the debt problem be over? The answer is ‘no’. This pessimist answer is arrived at by...
This paper looks at public sector debt in developing countries, being concerned specifically with the relationship between aid inflows and the public sector borrowing requirement net of aid loans. After examining the public sector budget constraint...
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major...
This paper analyses debt relief efforts by creditors to alleviate the debt burden of low-income countries. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative builds on traditional debt relief, and for the first time involves relief on multilateral...
This paper evaluates Cameroon’s foreign debt situation by analysing its evolution (structure, debt service payment, debt ratio, borrowing conditions, etc.). The analysis is extended by examining the internal debt situation, taking into account its...
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