The name is absent

income debtor countries has improved signi...cantly (Boote and Thugge, 1997),
heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs), most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa,
have continued to experience d^culties meeting their external debt service oblig-
ations. In order to deal with these countries’ speci...c problems, the World Bank
and the IMF have, in September 1996, jointly proposed and implemented the so
called HIPCs Debt Initiative.

Very recently, the Fund has been also involved in the East Asian .nancial
crisis and itstill seems the case that debt acceptance of a Fund agreement signals
something about the country’s intentions which somehow reassures the market
and in turn makes commercial creditors more willing to accord rescheduling of a
country’s debt.

The rescheduling process is a mechanism which allows debtors not to de-
fault on their loans and to remain in the international .nancial system. It also
prevents creditors from facing the whole consequences of a .nancial crisis. More
speci.cally, it can be considered as a form of “debt reorganisation”, in which pay-
ments of a principal and/or interest falling due in a speci.ed interval, are deferred
for repayment on a new schedule, following negotiations between creditors and
debtors. Since a rescheduling is a postponement of a payment, creditors would
like to have some “guarantee” that this postponement will in fact contribute to
an improvement in the economic conditions of the debtor country and that it will
enable it to better service its external debt. One wayto obtain this would be that
the debtor country decides to adopt an adjustment programme supported by the
IMF (Ebenroth, Maina Peter and Kemner, 1995).

In concrete terms, an IMF programme consists of limitation of money sup-
ply growth, decrease in the government budget de.cit, credit control, improved
exchange rate policy and improvement of the trade balance. More recently, it has
also insisted that its borrowers reformed their .nancial system.

In this article we want to test the existence of a signi...cante∏ect of the adop-

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