This paper identifies the rationale behind the emergence of private sector development (PSD) as a special area of development assistance. It describes PSD policies’ main elements and instruments and provides an overview of the differences and similarities between the PSD activities of...

This paper studies the impact of uncertainty and debt crisis on the dynamics of the Mozambican economy over the last two decades. Investment boom and accelerated growth did not take place until peace and economic reforms were assured, helped by the role of the Paris Club creditors as senior...

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 relates the challenge of debt and the opportunities of debt reduction to the task of achieving the Millennium Declaration Development Goals, major new benchmarks for progress in development and reduction in poverty, inspired by a series of UN Conferences of the 1990s. It illustrates...

The paper presents a comprehensive survey of the ‘shopping list’ of sources of external finance that are directly channelled to the business sector of developing countries. Generally, our analytical survey covers the 1970-2000 period, and includes the distribution of foreign resources...

We explore whether foreign aid affects developing countries' creditworthiness, as proxied by the Institutional Investor's measure of country credit risk. Based on a simple model of international borrowing and lending, we develop the hypothesis that current aid reduces the likelihood of future...

While conditions in trade finance markets returned to normality in the main routes of trade, the structural difficulties of poor countries in accessing trade finance have not disappeared – and might have been worsened during and after the global financial crisis. In fact, there is a consistent...

An April 2015 World Bank report on attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) extreme poverty target has revealed that extreme poverty has been decreasing in all regions of the world with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in spite of the sub-region enjoying more than two...

An April 2015 World Bank report on attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) extreme poverty target has revealed that extreme poverty has been decreasing in all regions of the world with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in spite of the sub-region enjoying more than two...

China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This paper explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China (and vice versa). To do so, we build a new geocoded dataset of Indian...