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Surprises Ahead?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...
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...
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 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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In a bid to realize its development aspirations, Tanzania has made concerted efforts to increase public investment, particularly in the last decade. A significant proportion of these investments are financed by contracting debt, manifested by the...
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...
by Ylmaz AkyüzIn this article I will discuss the potential of the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanisms (SDRM), bearing in mind that we are dealing...
This paper analyses the role of foreign aid to assist development in two oil-rich countries: Indonesia and Nigeria. This paper seeks to understand the way foreign aid provided assistance to transform Indonesia from a ‘fragile’ state in the 1960s into...
In the wake of the current financial and economic crises, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa find themselves squeezed between likely reductions in official development assistance and the pressing challenge to eradicate poverty. Public expenditure...
This paper considers how the conditionality inherent in HIPC debt relief should be constituted to promote pro-poor policies. There are two dimensions to this. First, the extent to which the policies proposed are pro-poor. Second, the potential for...
Substantial amounts of debt relief have been granted to a set of low-income countries, as an alternative aid modality. Although the theoretical case for debt relief is firmly established, only empirical analysis can show whether debt relief is indeed...
The paper explores the implications of the external debt-servicing constraint for public health spending in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the health challenges have been great and debt servicing particularly burdensome.Using 1975–94 5-year panel...
Increasing attention is now being accorded to the importance of education within the framework of endogenous growth. Meanwhile, external debt servicing has appeared as a major constraint in many developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa...
Reducing or writing off the debts of the 41 heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) can potentially reduce social conflict by releasing resources from debt-service to enable governments to make fiscal transfers that lower the grievances of rebels...
This paper analyses the relationship between public sector borrowing and foreign development aid. It is concerned specifically with the public sector borrowing requirement net of aid, questioning the assumption that aid and this type of borrowing are...
This collection analyses the new trends in capital flows to emerging markets since the Asian crisis, their determinants and policy implications. It explains why such flows have declined so dramatically in recent years, emphasising both structural and...
This volume consists of 18 essays dedicated to the memory of Carlos Diaz-Alejandro on topics that reflect his interests and contributions to the history and theory of international trade and economic development. The issues covered include historical...
The authors of this book tackle the question of whether national policy autonomy is still possible, in the process challenging the new orthodoxy, and the dangers attendant upon deregulation. They explore the `political economy' of financial openness...
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 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...
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 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 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 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...
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...
In this paper we focus on the question: will the HIPC debt reduction programme help in the transformation of the development assistance business and change the rules of the ‘debt game’ in Africa? We concentrate on the donor and official creditor side...
The objective of this paper is to arrive at a better understanding of the implications of debt relief savings for poverty reduction in HIPC countries by focusing on one important channel of impact—human capital accumulation. Our simulation results...
The financing of Pakistan’s substantial current account deficits within the framework of IMF and the World Bank structural adjustment programmes—about 6 per cent of GDP in the early 1990s led to a debt crisis in the late 1990s. IMF considered this...
The Kenyan economy had a growth of –0.3 per cent in the year 2001, the lowest growth in the post-independence era. The dismal growth performance coincided with the period when the government was involved in grassroot consultations with civil society...