The G7 have agreed changes to the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Debt Initiative which will impose more conditionality in return for earlier relief from interest payments.
Finance
Finance
News
ESAF reforms to focus on poverty eradication
Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development, has called in parliament for the reform of the IMF’s ESAF loans to make them pro-poor.
Finance
News
G7 agree crisis mechanisms
G7 finance ministers have agreed a framework to include the private sector in future crisis bailouts.
Accountability
News
Curbing corruption
IMF policies have exacerbated corruption according to a Christian Aid briefing on new approaches to debt relief.
Finance
Analysis
Assessing Assessing Aid
A discussion and critique of the main points in a prominent World Bank report on aid policy and conditionality - “Assessing Aid, What Works, What Doesn’t and Why”. The Bank’s report is very frank about the many failures of aid financing, but its proposals of targeting finance to good performing countries are controversial (1999).
Finance
News
Scaffolding for global architecture
In late October the G7 took limited steps to strengthen the international financial architecture, after the World Bank-IMF annual meetings ended with a plethora of proposals but no substantive agreement.
Finance
News
ESAF-HIPC Link Attacked
Mr Jagdeo, Guayanese Finance Minister, has attacked the IMF for its lack of commitment to debt reduction and using the HIPC Initiative as a means of forcing countries to comply with ESAF programmes.
Finance
News
IMF Articles change on hold
Action to change the IMF’s Articles of Agreement to extend the Fund’s purview to cover capital account liberalisation has been put on hold since the financial crisis.
Finance
News
Citizens groups set out 6 point alternative plan
Leading non-governmental thinkers and advocates met in Ottawa in parallel with the Commonwealth Finance Ministers’ meeting to discuss financial crises and the needs of the world’s most vulnerable and poorest people.
Finance
News
“New debt crisis”
Investors’ growing aversion to risk is leading to a general withdrawal of finance from many Southern countries.
