Alternative approaches to modelling distributional and welfare effects of changes in policy and the economic environment in developing and transition countries are surveyed. Microsimulations range from pure accounting approaches to models with behavioural equations based on econometric estimates...

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, by exploring how the growing debt of...

This paper examines some of the issues associated with the aid donor process arising from the theory of agency or principal-agent models and endogenous policy determination. The principals may be viewed as legislators and the agents as the aid agency. In addition to adverse selection and moral...

This paper examines the impact of debt forgiveness and debt relief on official development assistance. From the recipient side, the econometric analysis suggests that countries that received debt relief also received more aid compared to those that did not qualify for debt relief. From the donor...

We analyse the aid portfolio of various bilateral and multilateral donors, testing whether they have prioritized aid in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Employing Tobit models that combine sectorally disaggregated aid data with various indicators reflecting the situation of...

The paper aims to enhance the existing literature on the debt-growth nexus by analysing the relationship in two separate country groups using the extreme bounds analysis for sensitivity tests and the mixed, fixed, and random coefficient approach that allows for heterogeneity in the causal...

The decline, or stagnation, in broad-based social expenditure, so crucial to the well being of mother and child, occurs because of various reasons. First, the government may derive less utility from this category of expenditure, compared to spending on its political support group, the military...

This paper examines the question if the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative provides a good basis for the HIPCs to exit from repeated debt rescheduling. Building on other reviews of the HIPC Initiative, the paper begins with a short summary of some key problems of the HIPC...

This paper explores the complementary use of two instruments to manage capital-account volatility in developing countries: capital-account regulations and counter-cyclical prudential regulation of domestic financial intermediaries. Capitalaccount regulations can provide useful instruments in...

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 level of current account deficit quite...