Alma Lucía Romero-Barrutieta , Aleš Bulíř , José Daniel Rodríguez-Delgado
{"title":"The dynamic implications of debt relief for low-income countries","authors":"Alma Lucía Romero-Barrutieta , Aleš Bulíř , José Daniel Rodríguez-Delgado","doi":"10.1016/j.rdf.2014.07.003","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Debt relief provides low-income countries with an incentive to accumulate debt, boost consumption, and reduce investment over time. We quantify this incentive effect employing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, calibrated to 1982–2006 Ugandan data, and find that long-run debt and consumption-to-GDP ratios are about twice as high with debt relief than without it, while the investment-to-GDP ratio is sixty percent lower. Our simulations show that debt-relief episodes are likely to have only a temporary impact on debt levels but may have a lasting effect over the size of the economy, lowering GDP growth up to twenty percent over time. These results fill a gap in the debt relief literature since, to the best of our knowledge, the quantification of incentive effects is rather scarce. The paper further contributes to the literature by constructing a tractable structural model that is able to replicate the data well and captures key features of low-income countries facing the possibility of debt relief.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":39052,"journal":{"name":"Review of Development Finance","volume":"5 1","pages":"Pages 1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2015-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.rdf.2014.07.003","citationCount":"16","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Review of Development Finance","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879933714000207","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 16
Abstract
Debt relief provides low-income countries with an incentive to accumulate debt, boost consumption, and reduce investment over time. We quantify this incentive effect employing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, calibrated to 1982–2006 Ugandan data, and find that long-run debt and consumption-to-GDP ratios are about twice as high with debt relief than without it, while the investment-to-GDP ratio is sixty percent lower. Our simulations show that debt-relief episodes are likely to have only a temporary impact on debt levels but may have a lasting effect over the size of the economy, lowering GDP growth up to twenty percent over time. These results fill a gap in the debt relief literature since, to the best of our knowledge, the quantification of incentive effects is rather scarce. The paper further contributes to the literature by constructing a tractable structural model that is able to replicate the data well and captures key features of low-income countries facing the possibility of debt relief.