IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/adb/adbadr/624.html

The External Debt-Servicing Constraint and Public-Expenditure Composition in Sub-Saharan Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Augustin Fosu

Abstract

In the light of the current global financial and economic crises, how would governments in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) allocate their budgets across sectors in response to a binding debt-servicing constraint? Within a framework of public-expenditure choice, the present paper estimates constraint-consistent debt-service ratios and employs them in Seemingly Unrelated Regression involving five-year panel for up to 35 African countries over 1975-94, a period preceding the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiatives. While observed debt service is found to be a poor predictor of expenditure allocation, constraining debt servicing shifts spending away from the social sector, with similar impacts on education and health. The implied partial elasticity of the sector’s expenditure share with respect to debt is estimated at 1.5, the highest responsiveness by far among all the explanatory variables considered, including external aid. Thus, if the social sector is to be protected, sufficient debt relief for SSA countries should be pursued.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Augustin Fosu, 2010. "The External Debt-Servicing Constraint and Public-Expenditure Composition in Sub-Saharan Africa," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 22(3), pages 378-393.
    • Handle: RePEc:adb:adbadr:624
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F34 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - International Lending and Debt Problems
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:adb:adbadr:624. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John Anyanwu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/afdbgci.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.