Debt Relief

We provide evidence about the efficiency of debt relief during the Heavily Indebted Poor Coun- tries initiative and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative. We test the hypothesis stating that relieved countries would not have seen their performances rise that much, had they not benefitted from relief. We define debt (relief) and go over the history of debt reliefs and studies on this field, followed by a brief first attempt at a linear (OLS) regression of relief on GDP per capita, Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) and democracy scores. Lacking conclusive results, our empirical strategy turns to the use of average treatment effects, an adaptation of a method from Acemoglu et al. By controlling for the GDP dynamics linearly, we draw a counterfactual path for GDP around relief. We find evidence that debt relief might not provide a substantial treatment effect for GDP growth. A qualitative analysis of the evolution of MDGs tends to confirm this: debt relief did not deliver either a substantial advantage to the economical or social infrastructure of over-indebted countries. Assuming that these inefficient results are due to a lack of governance and corruption, we propose a solution for a more potent debt relief, by adapting the Swiss debt brake mechanism.

... emit an additional 1.2 billion leva in currency. The influential director of the Public Debt Agency (PDA) Nicola Stoyanov proposed a 1 billion leva zero interest credit from the BNB. 49 The cause of heterodoxy was not helped, however ...

... emit an additional 1.2 billion leva in currency. The influential director of the Public Debt Agency (PDA) Nicola Stoyanov proposed a 1 billion leva zero interest credit from the BNB. 49 The cause of heterodoxy was not helped, however ...

Considered an “A-student” by the Bretton Woods Institutions, Mali benefitsfiom debt relief: Growth resumed afier the 1994 devaluation, but poverty did not decrease significantly. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper gives priority to investment in education and health. In countries like Mali, the effectiveness of such policies is questionable, at least in the short or medium run. We propose to focus on the dynamics of poverty reduction. To promote equality of opportunity, redistribution issues should be taken into consideration, but also ways of promoting an increase in rainfed agriculture and steady job creation in urban areas.

Debt forgiveness is at the heart of the gospel message. The Lord sent His Son to redeem the debts of the world created by Adam and Eve and that were transmitted to subsequent generations of humanity. The New Testament restored older biblical ideas of debt relief, such as the Jubilee. The Lord’s Prayer begs God to forgive the pious their debts, as
they also forgive their debtors (Mt 6:12). Yet what, if anything, does that mean for legal
practice? Is there a Christian mode of debt collection and enforcing contractual promises? Should Christian creditors refrain from exercising their rights? This paper explores the responses to these questions given by canon lawyers and moral theologians in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, many of whom belonged to the so-called ‘School of Salamanca’. They took natural law as the ultimate measure to evaluate the lawfulness of man’s actions in the world. I conclude that these moral and legal experts were sensitive to the needs of indigent debtors, but certainly not to the point of promoting debt cancellation. They insisted upon the bindingness of contractual promises (pacta sunt servanda) and considered postponing repayment to be the most appropriate manner
to deal with insolvent debtors. Debt relief in the strict sense was viewed suspiciously, since the marketplace is subject to the dictates of justice, not charity.

Page 1. Review of African Political Economy No. 86:519-535 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2000 ISSN 0305-6244 Debt Relief & Social Investment: Linking the HIPC Initiative to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Africa: The Case of Zambia1 Fantu Cheru ...

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between the probability of default of lesser developed country commercial bank debt and the level of debt reduction granted by commercial banks. The analysis tests this relationship by regressing debt reduction totals for 29 middle-income debtors on 11 default probability indicators over the years 1985 through 1993 and finds a statistically significant relationship between the expected probability of default and the level of debt reduction. However, the findings fail to determine clearly the overall direction of this relationship. Thus, the evidence is insufficient to support the conclusion that the banks have behaved systematically as if they believed a debt-relief Laffer curve existed. Copyright 1996 Western Economic Association International.

In the mid-1990s, an initiative was launched to provide special debt relief from public creditors to more than forty Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs). In 1999, this initiative was further refined and widened in what has been hailed as a new approach to development co-...

Aid (ODA, Official Development Assistance) statistics are routinely produced by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD on the basis of data provided by bilateral donor agencies and using definitions and guidelines that represent a broad donor consensus. The use of ...

Jewish observance of shmita (alternatively spelled shemitah)—the sabbatical year, or seventh (sheviit) year—is changing. Historically rooted in agriculture, modern Jewish environmentalists are seizing upon the long-ignored environmental and social justice (tikkun olam) aspects of shmita as originally described in the five books of Moses, the Torah in the Hebrew Bible, the basis of Jewish law. Primary research was conducted through key-stakeholder interviews with leading American and Israeli Jewish environmentalists and thought leaders. They see shmita as a core Jewish value—one that, like Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, has the power to transform society. Their work has brought shmita from an obscure law dealt with mainly by Israel's Orthodox to a new Jewish ethos being discussed across the United States, Europe, Israel, and even on the floor of Knesset, Israel's parliament. This article also describes shmita as delineated in the Torah and through the rabbinic canon of halacha (Jewish law), and explains shmita practice from biblical times to the present day.

In September 2005, the leaders of virtually all the world's national governments met at the United Nations World Summit in New York to assess how far they had come, and what remained to be done, to meet the ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) they had set five years before. In New York there was broad agreement on the importance and

We present a conceptual framework for analyzing external debt sustainability in heavily indebted poor countries with predominantly concessional debt owed to official creditors. In the absence of a secondary market for official debt, the paper argues for the dynamic present value of debt as a proxy for assessing the real value of debt with below-market interest rates. It also models the current institutional mechanism of debt relief for low-income countries in the form of rescheduling on concessional terms. The analytical approach combines a stock analysis of external debt with a flow analysis of balance of payments in a parsimonious forward-looking framework suitable for projection of alternative scenarios and sensitivity analysis of key policy variables. Illustrative applications in two country cases show how the theory can be applied for policy formulation.