Submitted by crinadmin on
In a New Economics Foundation (NEF) research paper, 'Debt relief as if people mattered', the Jubilee research programme (an official successor to the Jubilee 2000 campaign and project of NEF), proposes a radical new approach to debt cancellation - based on the amount of revenue that a government can be expected to raise without increasing poverty or compromising the meeting of basic human needs. This means a change from the traditional approach to debt cancellation based on crude financial measures - towards protecting government spending needed to meet basic human development needs as well as not taxing those people who already live below the poverty line. NEF's new analysis adopts an ethical poverty line of $3 per person a day - a level more compatible with the basic human rights of well-being and health than the $1 and $2 a day poverty lines used by the World Bank and others. Based on this, and using data for 136 countries, NEF has calculated which countries will need 100 per cent cancellation of their debts and which will need some debt relief to reduce their debt to a sustainable level. The results show that of the 136 countries surveyed, between 51 and 54 needed complete cancellation of their debts and between 32 and 53 needed partial cancellation on human rights grounds. Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, need 100 per cent debt relief, amounting to $11.8 billion and $10.5 billion, respectively. Further information
pdf: http://www.crin.org/docs/nef_debt.pdf