Debt Relief And Beyond

The history of debt relief goes back several decades. It reveals that a country s accumulation of unsustainable debt stems from such factors as deficiencies in macroeconomic management, adverse terms-of-trade shocks, and poor governance. Debt-relief initiatives have provided debt-burdened countries with the opportunity for a fresh start, but whether the benefits of debt relief can be preserved depends on transformations in a country s policies and institutions. In 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative was launched as the first comprehensive, multilateral, debt-relief framework for low-income countries. In 2005, the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative was established, which increased the level of debt relief provided to HIPCs. As of early 2009, assistance through these two initiatives had been committed to 35 countries and amounted to US$117 billion in nominal terms, or half of the 2007 GDP of these countries. 'Debt Relief and Beyond' assesses the implications of debt relief for low-income countries and how its benefits can be preserved and used to fight poverty. The chapter authors bring unique operational experience to their examination of debt relief, debt sustainability, and debt management. Several key questions are addressed, including, what consequences does debt relief have for poverty-reducing expenditures, growth, and access to finance? Can debt relief guarantee debt sustainability? How can debt management at all levels of government be improved? What lessons can be learned from countries that have experienced debt restructuring? Finally, this book provides sound empirical evidence using current econometric techniques.

Capitalism only celebrates success, and it can be difficult to know what to do when confronted with failure. This book explores what happens when people go broke and what the experience of bankruptcy and insolvency is like from a qualitative perspective. It shows, contrary to the expectations of policy makers, that debt relief is not transactional. Rather, it is moral, theological, social and cultural. The book demonstrates that debt encompasses fairness, trust, faith, sin, guilt, revelation and confession and that taking these factors seriously is vital to successfully navigating the world of the over-indebted.

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

This paper discusses World Bank and IMF support for addressing fiscal and debt distress in IDA countries, with emphasis on strong continued concessional flows for green, resilient, and inclusive development.

This book critically analyses the topic of US-led external interventions in the affairs of developing countries by using one of the most contested experiments of modern times, namely, the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. The March 2003 invasion of Iraq has so far failed to deliver the benefits and outcomes its supporters anticipated, prompting international discussion as to whether the promises of externally-led nation-building (as an attempt to mould rogue states in a democratic, market-friendly fashion) are outweighed by the kinds of pitfalls and perils of intervention that have come to characterise the Iraq experience. This book identifies and addresses the major issues emerging from the current debate including the evolution of external interventionism as an idea, an explanation of what went wrong in post-Saddam Iraq and why the Iraq experiment is flawed by the Bush administration's refusal to address long standing political and historical grievances among Muslims as part of the 'War on Terror'. The contributors assess the troubled relationship between Islam and the West, the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, foreign policy debates in the US, and how economics and politics are juxtaposed in a highly contentious manner in any project of externally-driven nation-building. Beyond the Iraq War brings together scholars and practitioners in an attempt to move beyond the polemical dimensions of the existing debate and provide a balanced analysis of what the Iraq enterprise can tell us about the brand of external interventionism espoused by the Bush administration and also the lessons it holds for any future interventions into the affairs of states. It combines a mix of disciplines, most notably international relations and economics as well as theory and empirical evidence. The book is written in a non-technical, but rigorous, manner in order to make complex and diverse issues accessible to the general reader This fascinating and scholarly work will appeal to academics and scholars in the fields of political economics, political science and international relations. Policymakers, journalists and media commentators will also find this work to be of great interest and value.