This paper (i) traces the historical origins of foreign aid, (ii) investigates tren­ds in the volume, composition, allocation and quality of aid flows, and (iii) reviews the empirical literature on aid allocation. The paper concludes that, historically, aid has served a multitude of objectives....

This paper traces the origins of World Bank indicators of debt distress and their employment as HIPC sustainability targets. These targets are interpreted as ‘switching values’, below which countries are (on average) expected to avoid debt service problems, but as such, they do not take into...

The paper examines the most recent data on the external debts of developing countries in order to assess whether the external debt crisis is a thing of the past, or whether there is still cause for attention and concern. The main conclusion of the paper is that while a number of middle-income...

This article traces the origins of HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Country) debt sustainability targets. These targets are interpreted as 'switching values', below which countries are expected to avoid debt service problems but, as such, they do not take into account that countries encounter debt...

Michaelowa (2003, 2002) proposes a political-economy model to explain the re-design of the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt reliefinitiative in 1999. The principal assumption justifying the adoption of thisalternative approach is an alleged paucity, if not non-existence, of applied...

In this paper we consider solutions which select from the core. For games with side payments with at least four players, it is well-known that no core-selection satifies monotonicity for all coalitions; for the particular class of core-selections found by maximizing a social welfare function...

This paper gives a definition of adaptive learning for extensive form games and provides sufficient conditions for convergence points of adaptive learning sequences to be sequential equilibria.

In the minimum cost spanning tree model we consider decentralized pricing rules, i.e. rules that cover at least the efficient cost while the price charged to each user only depends upon his own connection costs. We define a canonical pricing rule and provide two axiomatic characterizations....

This paper is a survey of existing estimation techniques for stationary and ergodic diffusion processes observed at discrete points in time. The reader is introduced to the following techniques: (i) estimating functions with special emphasis on martingale estimating functions and so-called...