发展中国家的对外援助和援助依赖

发展中国家的对外援助和援助依赖
Foreign Aid and Aid Dependencies in Developing Countries

援助依赖的水平和影响因国家而异。世界银行和国际货币基金组织共同发起了一项名为“重债穷国（HIPC）倡议。这个计划的目的是为贫困国家提供良好的政策和债务核销。然而，一些人认为国家被归类为HIPC倡议标准不足以涵盖所有的国家都应该主动。例如，许多人认为，巴基斯坦应该被归类为一个重债穷国，应该得到沉重债务穷国的倡议，这是目前不符合所有标准的好处。令人惊讶的是，虽然巴基斯坦不满足很多标准，具有债务净现值为重债穷国做出口比国家更高的比。2002、债务出口比净现值约为277%（安2002）。由于巴基斯坦满足一些标准，并不是所有的，它不是给予优惠的贷款利率，使债务状况更加困难比其他贫困国家巴基斯坦。然而，一个反论点也可以对“贫穷国家的标准”的标准。许多捐助者经常批评巴基斯坦实施扶贫政策不符合条件。这使巴基斯坦关于其外部债务情况处在一个非常有争议的立场。

The level and impact of aid dependencies vary from country to country. The World Bank and the IMF collectively have initiated a program called the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. This program is aimed at providing debt write-offs to poor countries with good policies. However, some argue that criteria for countries to be classified for HIPC initiative are not adequate enough to encompass all the countries that are deserving of the initiative. For example, many argue that Pakistan should be classified as a Heavily Indebted Poor Country and should gain the benefits of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, which it currently does not as it does not meet all criteria. Surprisingly, although Pakistan does not meet a lot of the criteria, is has a ratio of Net Present Value of Debt to exports much higher than the countries classified as HIPC do. In 2002, the NPV of debt-exports ratio was about 277% (Anwar, 2002). Since Pakistan meets some of the criteria, and not all, it is not given concessional interest rates on loans, which makes the debt situation much more difficult for Pakistan than other HIPC nations. However, a counter argument could also be made regarding the criteria of "poor countries with good policies". Many donors often criticize Pakistan for implementing poor policies via non-compliance to conditionalities. This places Pakistan in a very controversial position regarding its external debt situation.

Evolution of Aid Inflows in Developing Countries: Demand Side Factors
发展中国家援助资金流入的演变：需求侧因素
In developing countries, especially those classified as Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, lies a major paradox, i.e. these countries become classified as such after twenty years of borrowing, debt relief and concessional lending. This suggests that merely a few loans or debt restructuring cannot solve problems for developing countries so quickly so as to also have a sustainable effect on the economy of the country. "In Haiti, an HIPC, the ratio of foreign debt service to exports has reached 40%, well above the 20-25% thought to be 'sustainable'," (Easterly, 2002). However, this is largely due to the fact that Haiti used its debt accumulation, not to finance production and investment, but to add to the government's expenditure on themselves, their army and their police. This is also apparent in the case of Pakistan, where corruption and aid fungibility is a core problem of the entire system. Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon. "From the two Greek city-states who defaulted on loans from the Delos Temple in the fourth century BC to Mexico's default on its first foreign loan after independence in 1827 to Haiti's 1997 ratio of debt to exports of 484%, debt servicing difficulties have been a feature of the world economy throughout history," (Easterly, 2002). One of the reasons why loans end up having negative effects on the economy is because when providing loans, the World Bank, IMF, and any other government assumes that after giving the loans to a borrowing country, that borrowing country will reach a level of sustainable growth and development. Recipient country's preparation for a loan that is meant to be utilized to improve economic situation, is usually not present. Borrowing countries usually lack proper infrastructure, such as a basic collection and analysis of local statistics. According to the World Bank, it takes developing countries at the very least 2 years to create a comprehensive strategy that is needed to implement changes as per the terms of a loan. Unsustainable debt burdens are unlikely to be lessened without debt relief, mostly because developing countries have been given too little relief too slowly in the past. For extremely poor countries, it is practically impossible to reduce poverty and borrow at the same time to improve the economy. Eventually, lack of preparation on the part of the borrowers usually leads to ineffective use of financial resources, which in turn only jeopardizes country's future ability to repay debt.

Elements of Supply Side Factors of Granting Aid
给予援助的供给方因素的影响因素
Often times, it is questioned why donors and multilateral financial institutions still keep lending regardless of poor credit quality of borrowing countries. Although Pakistan has been efficient in returning IMF loans, it has faced a lot of difficulty dealing with other lenders, recently asking for a debt write-off even. Then why do these lenders still continue to lend to countries that have displayed such negative growth, bad policies and accumulating levels of debt? If they continue to attempt to "fill in the financing gap" in these countries, unsuccessfully as has happened before, then this will only add on to their burden of having to lend in the future again. However, although it seems quite far-fetched, donors may just want to assume the role of helping balance the level of assets between developed and developing countries. "The official lenders may want to keep lending even when the loans do not promote development because multilateral and donor agencies are often rewarded for volumes of assistance rather than results," (Easterly, 2002). In some cases, lenders might want to keep lending to countries like Pakistan in the hope that this might prevent borrowers from defaulting and thus not being able to pay back previous loansor on other creditors. However, this eventually fails the purpose of lending by multilateral financial institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank. For example, "The World Bank (1998b) mentioned that it had given loans HIPCs AND DEBT RELIEF 1681 to finance the same agricultural policy reforms in Kenya five separate times," (Easterly, 2002). Due to such inefficiencies, suppliers of loans to borrowing countries such as Pakistan must also partially take the blame for financing governments with poor policies that are detrimental to their own citizens.
In defense of suppliers such as the IMF and World Bank, USGAO (2000), refers to reasons why donors are not to be blamed, as most borrowers would prefer to do. Suppliers of loans must keep in mind that political leaders of borrowing countries cannot be easily bypassed. Conflicts have to resolved with the upper level staff of a borrowing country, otherwise conflicting objectives regarding the same financial resources only worsens the economic situation. Donors must be willing to align their contributions with the country's priorities, which should be safe-kept by the political leaders of the nation. Many argue that too many conditionalities and terms of loan agreements only delay and hurt the debt relief initiative, and eventually countries are unable to pay back their loans on time. However, multilateral institutions respond by saying that they cannot compromise quality in order to meet a time frame requirement.

Aid and Aid Dependency Experiences of Different Classifications of Economies
不同类型经济体的援助和援助依赖经验
Aid has become synonymous with economic-buttressing. Over the course of last century, economic prosperity for the modern world resulted in widespread disparity between the developed and developing worlds. In order to avoid the consequent resentment and bridge the gap, developed nations used aid as a ladder for the rest to climb upon. Marshall Plan provided the most prominent example of such an occurrence. However, over the course of time, aid has shown to cause some negative consequences along with the positive.
Aid Dependence has become the synonym with economic stagnation for the developing nations. Studies over the consequent effects of aid have shown negative effects on internal revenue collection due to aid dependence. Moreover, aid dependence causes the political hierarchy to move away from cultivating relations with its citizens and move towards seeking foreign support. This results in lack of accountability and consequently corruption. Pakistan has proven this. Most importantly, all these factors result in democratic institutions being supplanted by authoritarian regimes, focusing on goal-oriented and aid-driven projects rather than institutional development.

Foreign Aid Inflows and Accumulating Public Debt
外资流入与累积公共债务
It is practically obvious that countries such as Pakistan, and for example African countries, find it difficult to involve themselves in adjustment programs due to the lack of adequate finance. This is not expected to be a short term process, but can in fact easily be assumed that long-term external financing is necessary for sustainable adjustment to the economy. "The highest immediate returns from expanded official flows to import-strangled economies are typically reaped from the provision of increased inputs for the rehabilitation and full utilization of existing capital stock rather than from the creation of new capital," (Helleiner, 1992). Structural adjustment aimed at growth, however, is most effective when aimed at new production, specifically in tradable goods and services, known as the import-substitution effect. Growth, via foreign borrowing, is further enhanced if funds are used for the expansion of social infrastructure as well and towards "directly productive capital stock for steady longer run development" (Helleiner, 1992).
Unfortunately, Pakistan also faces a problem with its "absorptive capacity" due to situations in the country similar to war, civil unrest, political instability, corruption and terrorism. Where "absorptive capacity" is not an issue, donor conditionalities make it difficult for Pakistan to effectively manage the foreign funds. Although donors have a right in putting conditions on how their funds must be used, but in order to see effective development, certain amount of leverage with free-flowing funds must be given to governments that do show tendencies towards good policies, relative to their own country's conditions. Another problem that Pakistan faces is the problem of continuing debt trap. Pakistan has consistently required more funds to finance new ones, and this has only added to worsening debt accumulation problem of the country, hampering economic and social development. In fact, the pressure, especially political, of negotiations related to debt take away from the decision making process and attention needed for development-oriented decision-making. This shows how a debt overhang "detracts from effective economic governance and reduces absorptive capacity for utilization of further public resources, whether locally or externally mobilized, for development," (Helleiner, 1992). What is also important is the lack of the public to deal with further external debt servicing as they understand that this servicing will either come through controversial further external borrowing, or through their own pockets via heavy taxation. Tax evasion, being a major problem in Pakistan already, is worsened by the impact of external debt accumulation.

Persisting Resource Gaps and the Debt Burden
坚持资源缺口与债务负担
Debt burden plays a large part in formulating a country's economic policies. It is useful to understand the dynamics which come into play when a debt burden becomes exceedingly large. Foreign debt ratio affects not only the private investment in the country but also impacts upon the future repayment of external debt. Resource Gap analysis usually do not provide an adequate measure to define the sustainability of the debt burden. Therefore a varied approach is required to address the issue. When debt burden becomes exceedingly large the tendency to invest in development projects recedes in favor of debt-servicing.

Structure of Debt: Internal and External
债务结构：内部和外部
The article also describes what Pakistan's external debt consists of, with public and publicly guaranteed debt being the most dominant, while others include private non-guaranteed credits, central bank deposits, and IMF loans. (Anwar, 2002).

Public Debt, Debt Trap and Sustainability of Debt
公共债务，，债务可持续性的债务陷阱
Debt sustainability, development and economic growth can be extremely tricky when combined. In order to maximize as many benefits as possible from debt, the optimal level of debt must be established. Jain (1990) defined optimal level of debt for a country as a function of financial risk, country's debt capacity and inflation. Financial risk basically arises from the uncertainty of cash flow for a borrowing country, resulting from real shocks and inflationary shocks in the economy. "Accordingly, the maximum level of debt for a borrower should depend upon the extent to which the impact of price changes on a borrower's earnings is different from that on its costs," (Jain, 1990). Lesser risk in the financial markets of borrowing countries provides a mechanism by which the borrowing country may be in better positions to repay external debt. On the other hand, debt capacity of a country represents its ability and, more importantly, willingness to repay debt. Lastly, inflation and inflationary shocks "the variability of cash flows and hence the debt capacity calculations by lenders should explicitly take the impact of inflation into account," (Jain, 1990). In fact, the impact of inflation on foreign exchanges worsens the potential impact of internal and external shocks within the borrowing country that affect debt.

Politics of Debt and the Debt Trap
债务政治与债务陷阱
Fischer (1989) argues that "the most-remarkable feature of the debt strategy followed since 1982 is that the heavily indebted developing countries have been transferring real resources of close to five per cent of their income to the developed creditor countries. A solution of the debt crisis will either reverse the direction of this resource flow or at least significantly reduce it." Although it is common for borrowing countries to delay or negotiate terms of loans, Pakistan, like some other countries, has majority of the time been able to meet its contractual agreements, especially those with the IMF. Sachs (1989) refers to political influences in debt as well, emphasizing on the "political costs of default that might be imposed on debtor governments by creditor governments as well as costs imposed on the debtor government by residents of debtor countries that depend upon friendly relations with foreign creditors," (Dooley, 1994). However, such countries often fail to recognize the complete costs of debt overhang, which eventually leads them towards a debt crisis. There could be many reasons for this lack of awareness. Historically, the penalties imposed on countries that have defaulted by the lenders have been very small, having a temporary effect on the economy. Another reason could be that "unilateral default would not provide efficiency gains similar to those provided by 'additional' forgiveness," (Dooley, 1994). Sometimes, when countries are defaulting on a loan, creditors other than the ones that they are defaulting on might also save them. The second creditor might interfere and pay the original creditor. This creates a web of linkages and interdependence between various debtors and creditors. "Even if the debtor would be better off by defaulting on existing loans and even if new creditors could be protected from legal claims of existing creditors, the debtor government might not be able to credibly commit to the default. It follows that the inefficiencies generated by the debt overhang may be the dominant, but indirect, penalty imposed by creditors that accounts for the willingness of debtor countries to service their debts on contractual terms," (Dooley, 1994).

Lack of Sustainability of Debt in Developing Countries
发展中国家债务的可持续性缺乏
Lack of sustainability of debt in developing leads to a condition that Kraay and Nehru (2003) refer to as "debt-distress". Debt distress is defined as a condition in which countries have a) significant arrears on external debt, b) Paris Club style rescheduling, and c) non-concessional IMF lending. When analyzing the incidence of debt distress, Kraay and Nehru (2003) discover three main factors, i.e. the debt burden, the quality of policies and institutions, and shocks.
Although there is a tendency to classify developing countries together, it must be understood that a single debt threshold cannot be used across the board for all low income countries in need of debt. Every individual country's risk of debt distress should be taken into account when deciding the terms and conditions of the loans provided by lending institutions and government.

Debt and Political Regime
债务与政治制度
Governments and their policies also strongly effect the debt situation of a country, specifically when they have options of debt relief and debt restructuring. Some governments manipulate debt politics by keeping high discount rates. This reflects factors such as government corruption, political instability and interest group polarization (Easterly, 2002). After receiving debt relief, the borrowing country usually aims to accumulate the same amount of external debt as before. Because of an ability to do this, countries, especially with corrupt governments, take advantage of this option and keep wasting external finances in non-productive uses. Conditions of debt reliever could attempt to "control new borrowing by constraining a country's noninterest current account deficit," (Easterly, 2002). However, such a constraint could also prove to be quite ineffective as a country can reduce its assets in order to maintain an extremely low level of net worth so that further debt has to be provided by donors. A government can also follow a policy in which it declares "high discount rate on the rest of the economy through policies that tax private sector capital accumulation. If the government's discount rate is unchanged before and after debt relief, then these bad policies will persist with debt relief," (Easterly, 2002). Some governments may also just declare high discount rates because they understand how short their tenure could be, given that most poor debtor countries tend to have high levels of political instability, (Easterly, 1999). "The ''high discount rate'' can also be seen as shorthand for political economy factors that cause the government to overspend, prey on private enterprise, and over-extract rents from the economy to distribute as patronagea

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