Decline
The decline in the number of debt-for-nature swaps in recent years likely results in part from the higher prices of commercial debt in secondary markets. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservation organizations could purchase relatively large debt obligations on the secondary market at highly discounted rates. During this period, conservation organizations and national governments negotiated swaps at a rate of approximately five agreements per year. Since 2000, the number of swap agreements has dropped to about two per year. Additionally, other agreements for debt restructuring and cancellation, such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, lower a developing country’s debt obligation by much more than the relatively small contribution debt-for-nature swaps make. Also, debt-for-nature swaps have undergone thorough critique by skeptics; these criticisms may have contributed to the decline of the debt-for-nature financing mechanism.
Read more about this topic: Debt-for-nature Swap
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The decline of a culture
Mourned by scholars who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys.”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)