At a conference on debt relief held in Birmingham, a paper by Aldo Caliari, "The Debt Sustainability Framework: How the Bretton Woods Institutions managed to Subvert the Human Development Grounds for Debt Relief" , was presented.

On November 8 2007, RBW staff Aldo Caliari joined other members of Jubilee USA as a witness in hearings of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, on the Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Expanded Debt Cancellation of 2007.

A Human Development Approach To Preventing New Cycles of Debt

The G8 and the international financial institutions (IFIs) have recently emphasized their concerns about what they call “free-riding”, i.e. the situation in which “non-concessional lenders indirectly obtain financial gain from IDA’s debt forgiveness, grants and concessional financing activities without paying for it.

In this paper, written by Aldo Caliari from Center of Concern and Jean Merckaert from CCFD on behalf of the CIDSE/Caritas Internationalis Working Group on Resources for Development, the functioning of the existing mechanisms for ensuring debt sustainability in the long run, including mechanisms to address debt reaccumulation, are analyzed from a human development perspective.

In this paper for CIDSE ( International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity), Rethinking Bretton Woods project Director Aldo Caliari looks at the debt sustainability framework of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) based on an approach that holds that human development imperatives should take precedence over debt payments, a principle that has been partially endorsed by the International Conference on Financing for Development and other international instruments. 

This panel discussion at the World Bank's spring 2006 meetings brought together civil society representatives, staff and Board members of the Bretton Woods Institutions to examine the following questions:  Has the Debt Sustainability Framework been up to the task? Does it address the flaws of the HIPC Initiative? Does it incorporate the call by civil society organizations to cancel the debt as an instrument to free resources to fulfill human development priorities?

The current momentum around debt relief and development issues in general offers an opportunity that all those concerned with achieving further debt cancellation for the poorest countries cannot afford to miss.