After a massive international campaign calling attention to the development impact of foreign debt, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is now underway. But will the HIPC Initiative meet its high expectations? Will debt relief substantially raise growth? How do we make sure...

The history of debt relief goes back several decades. It reveals that a country's accumulation of unsustainable debt stems from such factors as deficiencies in macroeconomic management, adverse terms-of-trade shocks, and poor governance. Debt-relief initiatives have provided debt-burdened...

This dissertation studies the effects of fiscal policy and the challenges due to government debt. The first part of the work consists of an analysis of fiscal policy and government debt in theoretical models. We show in Chapter 2, how the public debt structure, split into internal and external...