Heavily Indebted Poor Countries - Response To Criticism

Response To Criticism

HIPC addressed its shortcomings by expanding its definition of unsustainable debts, making greater relief available to more countries, and by making relief available sooner.

Since 1996, the IMF has modified HIPC in several ways, often in response to the shortcomings its critics have highlighted. The IMF first restructured HIPC in 1999. These revisions modified HIPC's threshold requirements. Today, HIPC defines three minimum requirements for participation in the program. First, as before, a country must show its debt is unsustainable; however, the targets for determining sustainability decreased to a debt-to-export ratio of 150% and a debt-to-government-revenues ratio of 250%. Second, the country must be sufficiently poor to qualify for loans from the World Bank's International Development Association or the IMF's Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF, the successor to ESAF), which provide long-term, interest-free loans to the world's poorest nations. Lastly, the country must establish a track record of reforms to help prevent future debt crises.

In addition to the modified threshold requirements, the 1999 revisions introduced several other changes. First, the six-year structure was abandoned and replaced by a "floating completion point" that allows countries to progress towards completion in less than six years. Second, the revised HIPC allows for interim debt relief so that countries begin to see partial relief before reaching the completion point. Third, the PRGF heavily modified ESAF by curtailing the number and detail of IMF conditions and by encouraging greater input from the local community into the program's design.

One of PRGF's goals is to ensure that impoverished nations re-channel the government funds freed from debt repayment into poverty-reduction programs. To that end, each country's PRGF program is modeled around a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). PRSPs describe the macroeconomic, structural, and social programs that a country will follow to promote economic growth and reduce poverty. A broad range of government, NGO, and civil-society groups must participate in the development of the PRSP to ensure the plan has local support. Under the revised HIPC, a country reaches the decision point once it has demonstrated progress in following its PRSP. The country then reaches its completion point once it has implemented and followed its PRSP for at least one year and has demonstrated macroeconomic stability.

In 2001, the IMF introduced another tool to increase HIPC's effectiveness. Under the new practice of "topping up," countries that unexpectedly suffer economic setbacks after the decision point due to external factors, such as rising interest rates or falling commodity prices, are eligible for increased debt forgiveness above the decision-point level.

Further progress towards debt relief was announced on December 21, 2005, when the IMF granted preliminary approval to an initial debt relief measure of US $3.3 billion for 19 of the world's poorest countries, with the World Bank expected to write off the larger debts owed to it by 17 HIPCs in mid-2006."

As of December 2006, twenty-one countries have reached the HIPC completion point. Nine additional countries have passed the decision point and are working toward completion. Ten other countries carry unsustainable debts according to HIPC standards, but they have yet to reach the decision point. So far, the IMF and World Bank have approved $35 billion of HIPC debt relief. Five countries have received an additional $1.6 billion in "topping up" assistance since 2001.