Was the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) a Success?

Abstract

Historically, the sustainability of long-term debts has been a primary concern for both indebted countries and those who finance their debts.In the late 1990s the Bretton Wood's institutions (the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and the World Bank) launched the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiatives (HIPC I, 1996 and HIPC II, 1999) to reduce the burden of debt on highly indebted countries.If countries could meet certain complex criteria, the HIPC would stop the rescheduling of their debts.This article analyzes the effectiveness of the HIPC initiative and finds that its successes remain questionable.Author's Note Sarajuddin Isar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.He studies the role of taxation in building states in post conflict countries with a particular focus on Afghanistan.Isar holds an MA in Political Economy of Development from the University of Manchester, a Bsc in Economics and a Diploma in Business Administration from Afghanistan.Isar is a political economy professional with over 12 years of overseas experience in banking, finance and international development.Isar has worked in different key roles in organizations including the Central Bank of Afghanistan, United States Agency for International Development, United Nations World Food Program and international charities such as Catholic Relief Services, Acted and Afghanaid.

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.