Abstract
The debt problem of poor countries has attracted considerable public attention, not least through the well-targeted campaigns of Jubilee 2000 and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as civil society action in developing countries themselves. Unlike the earlier debt crisis of the 1980s (which mainly affected middle-income countries in Latin America), much of the debt of poor countries in Africa and elsewhere is owed to official creditors including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, a legacy of donor support to structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, debt service was taking a large and rising share of the public budget in poor countries, and donors came under mounting pressure to resolve the issue. In 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative was launched with the aim of cutting debt back to sustainable levels, thereby releasing more resources for development spending, including poverty reduction. After further public pressure, this was followed by the Enhanced HIPC Initiative of late 1999 which raised the amount of relief, accelerated the process and tightened the link between debt relief and the objective of poverty reduction. As of September 2003, eight HIPCs had reached their ‘completion points’ — the point at which they receive their full package of debt relief under the HIPC Initiative process (IMF and World Bank, 2003;World Bank, 2003c).
The assistance of Heidi Marttila in the preparation of this chapter is greatly appreciated.
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Addison, T., Hansen, H., Tarp, F. (2004). Introduction. In: Addison, T., Hansen, H., Tarp, F. (eds) Debt Relief for Poor Countries. Studies in Development Economics and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522329_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522329_1
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