From Debt Crisis to Growth Crisis

Revision with unchanged content. The existing explanations on the cause of developing countries¿ marginalization notwithstanding, there are, nonetheless, questions that remained unanswered. In this work the author finds empirical explanations regarding the extent to which Africäs growth crisis could be linked to the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is systematically structured into four parts. The first part revisits the convergence debate using a panel data approach. Emphasis is given to the position of the HIPCs to account for the role of external debt in the process of convergence. The second part, employing cross-section, and random and fixed effects strategies, investigates the determinants of overseas borrowing. The third part using cross-section pooled logit, and fixed effects logit models, explores the factors behind the debt repayment constraints of the developing nations in general and HIPCs in particular. The last part looks at whether external imbalances could be potential explanations for growth rate differences across the developing world. The critical innovation of this book is the premise that total external debt stock is uninformative, and therefore, should be decomposed according to maturity and source structures.