With concern about how to finance the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) widespread, recent donor pledges to raise aid volumes are welcome. However, aid alone will not suffice – bringing in new actors and sources of development finance will be essential. In many developing countries, this is...

Suppose a DAC donor earmarks $1 billion of taxpayers’ money for official development assistance (ODA). The donor may use two instruments as an outright grant or in combination with a market loan to produce a concessional loan of $2 billion with a percentage grant element of 50 per cent. Many...

Poor countries are and will remain for some time vulnerable to external shocks, whether to export prices or from natural disasters. The lowest-income countries have a higher incidence of shocks than other developing countries and tend to suffer larger damages when shocks occur. For the poorest...

One of the particular features of poor countries’ economies is their volatility, due mostly to their dependence on commodities. The paper shows that this volatility is a prime factor behind the debt crises of the poorest countries. It advocates the adoption by donors of a new lending...

This paper presents a new data set on human capital. It is based upon data released at the OECD for a subgroup of 38 member and non-member countries, and an effort performed at the Development Centre to expand this data set to other developing countries. The key to our methodology is to minimise...

Efforts to establish, test and analyse hypotheses regarding cross-country variations in women’s economic status are hampered by the lack of a readily accessible and easily used information resource on the various dimensions of gender inequality. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the <a href="http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/28/36223936.xls"...</a>

The paper attempts to explain why single factor explanations of the poverty of nations are usually found to be unsatisfactory. Middle- and low-income countries excluding sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, have an income per head which stands at about one third of the rich countries’ income per...

Raising manufacturing productivity is of central importance to the developing world and an essential element of policy making. <I>Overcoming Barriers to Competitiveness</I> is about establishing the most reliable analysis of manufacturing productivity possible and helping policy makers set their...</i>

The paper develops the view that the perspective on the HIPC initiative is distorted by the fact that -contrary to the Brady deal itself- it lacks all perspective on the “market value” of the debt which is written down. The appropriate “market value” is one that takes account of the risk...

The report argues that aid volatility is an important source of volatility for the poorest countries. Following a method already applied by the Agence Française de Développement, the report argues that loans to LICs should incorporate a floating grace period, which the country could draw upon...