Publication

This paper describes that the heavily indebted poor country (HIPC) debt relief initiative had two primary goals: reduce poor countries’ debt burdens to levels that would allow them to achieve sustainable growth and promote a new way of assisting poor countries focused on home-grown poverty alleviation and human development. However, the authors show that it has become clear that the HIPC program is not providing a sufficient level of sustainability to secure debt relief for poor countries in terms of sustained growth and poverty reduction. The authors offer a revised proposal which insures debt relief to poor countries and around which international donors could consolidate their efforts in the near term.