Research Brief
Debt
In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, debt crises have plagued low-, middle-, and high-income countries at various times. Indebted countries have generally addressed balance of payments crises either by (a) obtaining International...
Journal Special Issue
Development Financing
The real value of official aid flows fell for much of the 1990s, and private capital flows to low-income countries remain mostly limited. The decline in aid flows may endanger the development process, since they finance much of the development budget...
Journal Special Issue
Foreign Aid Heterogeneity
The present paper serves as an introduction to this special issue providing a justification for, and linking and introducing to the articles that follow. A central message emanating from the papers included in this special issue is that it is not...
Working Paper
Impacts of Africa's Growing Debt on its Growth
The main theme of this manuscript is to demonstrate that growth in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries has continued to decline under the burden of the foreign debt over the last fifteen years. After a decade of painful lost growth, the continent...
Working Paper
Mobilizing International Surpluses for World Development
The Study Group arrived at the following conclusions and recommendations: 1. Substantial surpluses on current account are likely to prevail for the next several years among many developed countries, and there is a need for their diversification...
Working Paper
The International Debt Problem
The aim of this paper is to raise a few open questions and to bring to light some mismatches between existing theories and the evidence. (1) It is shown that many standard international debt models unwittingly require some agents to behave...
Working Paper
The Intertemporal Effects of International Transfers
The classical transfer problem is studied in an overlapping generations framework, where the transfer is from a creditor country to a debtor country. A distinction is made between tax-financed and debt-financed transfers on the one hand, and between...
Working Paper
International Aid to Southern Europe in the Early Post-War Period
After the Second World War, both Greece and Italy experienced a Left-Right political polarization and a reproduction of earlier patterns of political patronage. Both Italy and Greece received international aid, including emergency relief, interim...
Working Paper
Loans or Grants?
We argue in this paper that cancelling the debt of the poorest countries was a good thing, but that it should not imply that the debt instrument should be foregone. Debt and debt cancellations are indeed two complementary instruments which, if...
Working Paper
Excess Credit and the South Korean Crisis
We provide a novel empirical analysis of the South Korean credit market that reveals large volumes of excess credit since the late 1970s, indicating that a sizeable proportion of total credit was being used to refinance unprofitable projects. Our...
Working Paper
Conditionality
Three changes in conditionality of loans are proposed in this study, in order to improve the relations between developing country borrowers and international lending agencies, and make the international cooperative effort at development and stability...
Working Paper
Making Fiscal Space Happen!
Debt relief and the scaling up of aid to low-income countries should allow for greater fiscal space for expenditure programmes to create long-term growth and lower poverty rates. But designing a suitable medium-term fiscal framework that fosters a...
Working Paper
Bankruptcy Proceedings for Sovereign State Insolvency and their Effect on Capital Flows
The paper examines the main issues involved in translating domestic bankruptcy procedures to the sovereign context. It considers some of the principles by which domestic bankruptcy procedures operate, and the extent to which they apply to...
Working Paper
A Development-focused Allocation of the Special Drawing Rights
Efforts to realize the issue of development-focused Special Drawing Rights (SDR) by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been on-going for many years. Recently, however, the campaign first gained a new momentum immediately after the Asian...