Briefing: The G8’s multilateral debt relief initiative and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

THIS SPRING, THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF) AND THE WORLD BANK will implement the next major phase of debt reduction for poor countries. The plan, agreed by the G8 in June 2005, and now known as the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), will erase 'as much as 100 percent' of the debts owed by qualifying countries, the vast majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. Although this is being presented as a momentous leap forward for Africa and the battle against global poverty, the actual gains may be more modest and elusive. Hopes for a major impact on poverty, or even on the cash flow of African treasuries, are unlikely to be realized. This does not imply that the MDRI is meaningless, but rather that the potential benefits are far from certain, likely to be long term, and are not of the kind that activists may be expecting.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.