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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the impact of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative on under five mortality rate (U5MR) in Sub-Saharan Africa. The HIPC Initiative involves debt forgiveness and the redirection of funds that were meant to service external debt towards the provision of social services and poverty reduction in eligible countries. The Initiative is akin to a natural experiment since some countries benefited while some did not, and the timing of debt forgiveness varied across countries. We exploit these variations to identify the impact of HIPC Initiative on child mortality using a dynamic panel data estimator. We find that participation in HIPC Initiative is associated with statistically significant decreases in U5MR. On the other hand, the impact of actual debt cancelled is statistically insignificant.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Dr Ezekiel Kalipeni, Dr Diana Grigsby-Toussaint and Dr Juliet Iwelunmor for inviting us to present the first version of the paper at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. We also acknowledge comments received from anonymous reviewers and from seminar participants at the Department of Economics, University of South Florida. Advise from Dr Murat Munkin and Dr Getachew Dagne is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank Mr Brian Hornung for proof reading initial version of the manuscript. However, they are not responsible for the views expressed in this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
John Bosco Oryema http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7218-4342
Notes
1. Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.