The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, I investigate whether numerous debt initiatives during the 1980s and 1990s have had a significant effect on economic growth rates in developing countries in general. The major initiatives during that time period were negotiated as bilateral agreements under the guidance of the Paris Club of Creditors. These agreements were complemented later on by the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative in 1996 and its "enhanced" version in 1999. I find that, on average, debt relief has no effect on growth rates of developing countries. The second question I address in this paper is whether the effect on growth rates was different for different subsets of developing countries. I find that countries that are not classified as HIPC have benefited significantly from debt relief, whereas the growth rates of HIPC countries have been unaffected.

In this paper I investigate the effects of recent debt relief initiatives such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Debt Initiative of 1996 on resource flows to developing countries. Focusing on a sample of low-income countries, I concentrate on the following questions. First, is the HIPC initiative selective in the sense of "rewarding" improved policies in HIPC countries with higher transfers? Measuring improvement directly with dummy variables representing progress in the initiative, I find that good macroeconomic management does not seem to matter in terms of the level of resource transfers and foreign aid received by a HIPC country. Second, have HIPCs and non-HIPCs experienced reductions in aid inflows (other than debt relief) in the 1990s and early 2000s? My estimates suggest that countries classified as HIPCs received higher (official and aggregate) net transfers than non-HIPC countries in the first half of the 1990s. These differences persist after 1996, however, at a lower level. Looking at net official development assistance, differences between HIPC countries and non-HIPC countries persist throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, with higher levels of aid going to HIPC countries. Third, have the debt relief initiatives in the 1990s provided additional resources to low-income countries? Confirming findings in earlier literature, my results suggest that aid flows have not changed significantly in response to debt relief.

One of the goals of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt initiative is to provide additional resources for basic health care to the population of eligible developing countries. In this paper I investigate the effect of debt relief on per capita health expenditure in a sample of developing countries while controlling for other factors used in the literature. I find that debt relief has - at the margin - little or no effect on health expenditure in countries that are classified as HIPC. The level of health expenditures in HIPC countries, however, is significantly higher than in other developing countries. On the other hand, countries not classified as HIPC increase their per capita health expenditures more than proportionally if they receive debt relief. This result is surprising considering that per capita amounts of debt relief provided to HIPC countries are on average significantly higher than those to Non-HIPC countries.

We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional income shocks. Equalization responds only weakly to income differentials but strongly to tax revenue differentials across states. A further result is that the correlation of state tax revenues with state GDPs has declined over time. This may reflect a weakening in state tax efforts in response to the adverse incentive effects of fiscal equalization.