Mozambique has been one of the first highly indebted countries to obtain a debt reduction, in the framework of HIPC and enhanced HIPC initiative, and to implement a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. The process is still in its early stages, but it is already possible to investigate on the recent...

The paper reviews the dynamics of the financing baseed its analysis on the rich dataset of AidData ranging over 1993-2010, with around 9,077 observations on projects funded in Senegal by various multilateral as well as bilateral donors. The study started in the same year as the establishment of...

The rival opinions expressed by Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty and by William Easterly in The White Man's Burden epitomize the dichotomy in the economics literature regarding the role of foreign aid in eliminating extreme poverty. On the one hand, the majority of governments see...

The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

External resources for a low income country have the potential of accelerating growth but also of creating Dutch Disease effects. This paper analyses the empirical impact of the most important external resources, foreign direct investment, aid, and loans, on the Bolivian economy for the period...

Exemplifying the negative consequences of a variety of inappropriate fiscal and social policies, Zimbabwe has failed to realize its potential to become a strong, independent state, going from the admiration and envy of its neighbours to near-complete collapse and abject poverty. Economic...

This paper reviews the main obstacles to human and social development posed by the current external debt burdens of the least development countries. In particular, it analyses the shortcomings of the mechanisms and thresholds used to assess the sustainability of debt levels in the HIPC...

While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amounts of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided...

This paper investigates whether economic development is an appropriate mandate for Official Development Assistance (ODA). The context for the paper is the change in focus of the New Zealand government aid programme which occurred in 2009. The paper starts by providing definitions of development...