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...

This paper attempts to analyse the economic implications of the rise of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, for developing countries situated in the wider context of the world economy. It examines the possible impact of their rapid growth on industrialized countries and developing countries,...

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 analyses debt relief efforts by creditors to alleviate the debt burden of lowincome countries. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative builds on traditional debt relief, and for the first time involves relief on multilateral debt. It seeks to reduce debt to sustainable...

The paper examines two issues associated with aid and fiscal policy. First, how best the conditionality behind foreign aid, sometimes non-economic, is complied with in a principal-agent framework. In a multiple task and multiple principal framework, principals are better off cooperating and...

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...

The objective of this paper is to examine debt dynamics of highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs) and identify key factors responsible for their protracted debt crisis. For this purpose, we first evaluate economic conditions of debt sustainability in the context of the intertemporal borrowing...

This paper discusses some issues on how to evaluate the impact of HIPC debt relief in the cases of Tanzania and Zambia using two computable general equilibrium models. Within our relatively simple model framework, we found that the macroeconomic impact of debt relief is modest. One reason for...

This paper analyses debt relief efforts by creditors to alleviate the debt burden of lowincome countries. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative builds on traditional debt relief, and for the first time involves relief on multilateral debt. It seeks to reduce debt to sustainable...