Through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, substantial amounts of debt relief have been granted to a set of low-income countries as an alternative instrument of aid delivery. The theoretical (and moral) arguments in favour of debt relief are well established. However, the...

Poverty assessment and targetting usually relies on expensive, large scale survey data. We argue that, in some cases, exploiting information villagers have on their immediate neighbors in close-knit agricultural societies might provide an alternative. We use the results of a participatory wealth...

After two debt relief initiatives launched in 1996 (the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, HIPC Initiative) and in 1999 (The enhanced HIPC initiative), the G7 decided to go further by cancelling the remaining multilateral debt for these HIPC countries through the Multilateral Debt Relief...

Recent research underscores the dual role played by institutions for deciphering the financial globalization – growth nexus. On the one hand, for capital account liberalization to be growth enhancing, a critical level of local institutional quality is needed. On the other hand, increased...

Substantial amounts of debt relief have been granted to a set of low-income countries, as an alternative aid modality. Although the theoretical case for debt relief is firmly established, only empirical analysis can show whether debt relief is indeed a (more) effective mode of aid delivery. We...

After two debt relief initiatives launched in 1996 (the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, HIPC Initiative) and in 1999 (The enhanced HIPC initiative), the G7 decided to go further by cancelling (most of) the remaining multilateral debt for these HIPC countries through the Multilateral Debt Relief...

This is an output of the Acropolis BeFinD project. The ‘Belgian Policy Research group on Financing for Development’ (BeFinD) is a collaboration between the University of Namur (CRED), the KU Leuven (HIVA and CGGS) and the University of Antwerp (IOB) in the framework of the VLIR-UOS and...

This paper starts from the concept of ‘original sin’ to demonstrate that the development of local currency bond markets remains a priority for Sub-Saharan African countries, both as a prevention mechanism against external shocks and to exploit growth-boosting investment opportunities. We...

The paper investigates whether differences in public sector management quality affect the link between public debt and economic growth in developing countries. For this purpose, we primarily use World Bank’s institutional indices of public sector management (PSM). Using PSM thresholds, we...

Sub-Saharan African governments have made significant progress in developing domestic local currency bond markets over the last decade. While this bodes well for their countries’ economic resilience and facilitates necessary investments, many challenges remain.