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Document de travail DIAL Mars 2009 RESUME L'appropriation des politiques de développement est devenue la base du nouveau consensus international formulé dans la Déclaration de Paris (2005). Les fondements théoriques de cette approche n'ont guère été explicités, et il est difficile de considérer que les Documents de Stratégies de Réduction de la Pauvreté (DSRP) traduisent réellement les options autonomes des gouvernements, notamment parce que ces documents demeurent généralement inchangés lors des alternances politiques. Le problème de base est que ces DSRP censés traduire l'appropriation sont « approuvés » en fin de compte par les Institutions de Bretton Woods, ce qui les rend juges et parties. Différentes options peuvent être envisagées pour faire progresser l'appropriation en pratique, tant au niveau institutionnel (une évaluation par les pairs pourrait aider à résoudre ce dilemme) qu'au niveau du contenu de l'évaluation de la qualité de l'appropriation.

After two debt relief initiatives launched in 1996 (the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, HIPC Initiative) and in 1999 (The enhanced HIPC initiative), the G7 decided to go further by cancelling (most of) the remaining multilateral debt for these HIPC countries through the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI, 2005). Building on earlier literature that tries to assess the fiscal response effects of HIPC debt relief, we extend this assessment by explicitly including the fiscal response effects of MDRI debt relief, and by using an extended dataset and alternative econometric techniques, in order to have sufficient hindsight and better tackle methodological issues such as country specific effects. We confirm earlier findings that debt relief, and especially the enhanced HIPC initiative, has had a positive impact on recipient country total domestic revenue and public investment (as percentage of GDP). Additionally, thanks to our large observation span, we also observe that the MDRI led to a significant increase in current primary expenditures and domestic revenue ratios, although these effects are on average smaller than the HIPC Initiative ones.

University Paris IX, Dauphine, and DIAL, Paris. Gautier, Marouani and Raffinot dedicate this article to the memory of Idrissa Dante, who tragically died before the final results of their collaboration could be published. The report on which the article is based benefited from the comments of Howard White, Günter Hornung (GTZ, Bamako) and an IMF team whom the authors would like to thank for their comments. 1. Notably, the existence of a previous UNDP-driven National Poverty Alleviation Strategy (SNLP) created problems at the start of the process.2. During our first visit to Mali for this research (September 2000), the persons we interviewed often got the PRSP and the SNLP mixed up.