The G-8 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) is the next step of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). There are two reasons why MDRI is unlikely to help poor countries. First, the amount of money at stake is trivial. The roughly $2 billion of annual debt payments to be...

In the year that capital-poor countries open their stock markets to foreign investors, the growth rate of their typical firm's capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by 4.1 percentage points. In each of the next three years the average growth rate of the capital stock for the 369...