Publication

The paper revisits the history of the pro-poor expenditure movements and reviews what we know about their effectiveness. After more than a decade of international attention to poverty reduction, the paper calls for a stronger focus on the empirical evidence of public expenditure effectiveness. While the poverty reduction agenda has colored the development discourse in broad terms, this paper focuses on the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative, which links debt relief explicitly to a reallocation of resources to poverty-reducing expenditure in low-income countries.