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 financial crises with the new liquidity problems of...

While we know a lot about how countries become prosperous, we have only begun to understand how aid contributes to economic growth and poverty reduction. The development record is mixed and no robust association between the volume of aid and development performance has been discovered. The...

Theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief by running up new debts or by running down assets. And there are some signs that incremental debt relief over the past two decades has fulfilled those predictions. Debt relief is...

The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

At the start of the millennium, the international community committed itself to help developing countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including through major increases in foreign aid spending. But there are significant differences of opinion about the merits of additional...

This paper examines the nature of aid projections in IMF programs with low-income countries. The authors assess the profile of aid broadly and across regions and investigate the compatibility of IMF projections with commitments made at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit to sharply increase aid. On...

This note was produced as background to the IEO evaluation of the IMF and Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa. It sets out the technical analysis underpinning the evaluation's estimate for spending and absorption ratios and elaborates further on its scope, rationale and limitations. It also presents more...

This study explores whether IMF-supported programs in low-income countries (LICs) catalyze Official Development Assistance (ODA). Based on a comprehensive set of ODA measures and using Propensity Score Matching approach to address selection bias, we show that programs addressing policy or...

We investigate the role of accounting and audit quality in the allocation of international development aid loans provided by the World Bank. This aid is crucial to improve governance functions, infrastructure, and capital markets, and the accounting and audit environments in a country can...

The serious economic impact deriving from the COVID-19 pandemic on already ailing low-income countries has prompted the search for support instruments among the international financial community. The official debt moratorium agreed by the G20 for these countries in the spring of 2020 has brought...