This paper analyzes the effects of a multilateral debt relief program on child health. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank launched the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative in the late 1990s to reduce the debt burdens of poor countries, and explicitly linked the initiative...

Recent global initiatives on debt relief and development assistance call for increasing aid for trade to the poorest countries. The paper applies a multi-country computable general equilibrium model to measure the effectiveness of alternative aid for trade categories. The findings show that aid...

The authors use preliminary results from an ongoing effort to construct estimates of debt relief to study its allocation across a sample of 62 low-income countries. They find some evidence that debt relief, particularly from multilateral creditors, has been allocated to countries with better...

The authors revisit the debt overhang question. They first use nonparametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer Curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial)...

This paper examines the determinants of "debt distress," which they define as periods in which countries resort to exceptional finance in any of three forms: (1) significant arrears on external debt, (2) Paris Club rescheduling, and (3) nonconcessional International Monetary Fund lending. Using...

This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective state is essential for development. It asks...

Using a new database of World Bank loans to support financial sector development, the authors investigate whether countries that received such loans experienced more rapid growth on standard indicators of financial development than countries that did not. They account for self-selection with...

Multilateral development banks are frequently accused of "defensive lending," the practice of extending new loans purely in order to ensure that existing loans are repaid. This paper empirically examine this hypothesis using data on lending by and repayments to the International Development...

Bridging the external financing gap has been an important factor in borrowing cgovernment's demand for World Bank loans. The demand for IBRD and IDA lending is positively related to an increase in debt service payments and inversely related to a borrowing country's level of reserves. These two...