Multilateral Debt Relief: A Promising Instrument to Increase Pro-Poor Public Expenditure?
This paper seeks to examine the extent to which the debt cancellations under the HIPC Initiatives have met their objective of reducing poverty by increasing public sector expenditure on healthcare and education (so called pro-poor spending) over the period of 1996-2005. There are mainly two reasons to believe that the debt relief efforts will enable increased social spending (i) the debt cancellat
