Karel Verbeke

Assessing debt-to-health swaps: a case study on the Global Fund Debt2Health Conversion Scheme

The Debt2Health Conversion Scheme of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is used to reassess a range of recent initiatives that propose debt relief in exchange for spending in the health sector. The experience with debt swaps in the mid 1990s was far from positive, and recent improved insight in the economics of debt relief suggests extreme caution. We argue that the recent spade of debt swap proposals, even if targeting countries and debt titles that fall outside current major international debt relief mechanisms, share most of the design faults of previous initiatives. Proposals such as Debt2Health do not constitute efficient vehicles to increase net transfers to poor countries, to reduce the economic disadvantages of indebtedness, or to strengthen public health systems of partner countries. For debt relief to constitute a valuable mechanism to provide aid, it should be designed as a large‐scale and comprehensive operation, with spending earmarked to broad country‐established priorities, and reinforce rather than undermine national implementation systems.

Assessing debt-to-health swaps

for determining whether an intervention is appro-priate for large-scale eff orts to pre vent chronic disease globally .However, we believe that they were remiss in not including lifestyle interventions for diabetes preven-tion in their list of recommended strat egies.Dietary choices, physical inactivity, and excess weight—the targets of life-style inter ventions—are clearly causal evidence. Initially training expanded rapidly, but it declined by the end of the millennium. In 2005–06, fi nancial recovery plans for NHS debt resulted in widespread freezing of all non-mandatory training for primary care trusts. Research assessment exercises also reduced academic support for clinicians for research, systematic reviews, and clinical practice,

Development Finance and Its Innovations for Sustainable Growth. An Introduction

This overview chapter takes off by situating development finance within the Financing for Development (FfD) framework and its associated current action agenda, the Addis Action Agenda. The chapter then proceeds to present a brief overview of the rest of the book, clustered by some of the major themes identified in the development finance agenda, as specified by the Addis Action Agenda. For each of these themes treated, this chapter first provides a brief sketch of the key issues at play, followed by a brief presentation highlighting how the particular chapter links to these key issues; consequently, it then summarizes the key conclusions of the chapter and its main contributions and novel insights to the field.