ABSTRACT
Having been on the verge of falling off development practitioners and analysts’ radar for nearly a decade, concerns about the ability to meet external obligations are rising, especially in those developing countries that benefited from debt relief in the past decade. This article reviews these issues by taking stock of some of the achievements of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) to date and by reflecting on the extent to which the ‘new’ debt-creating development finance flows – emerging lenders, international sovereign bonds, and public–private partnerships – may jeopardise debt sustainability and the results achieved so far.
