The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Debt Initiative, a major innovation in development finance, was designed to relieve the high external debt of some of the world's poorest nations. The Initiative was put in place by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1996 and enhanced in 1999. The HIPC Debt Initiative addresses a key obstacle to economic growth and poverty reduction, but it also contains multiple and overly-ambitious objectives. 'Debt Relief for the Poorest' is an independent evaluation which assesses the progress and prospects of the HIPC Debt Initiative...

The rural economy in Bangladesh has powerfully advanced economic growth and substantially reduced poverty, especially since 2000, but the remarkable transformation and unprecedented dynamism in rural Bangladesh remain an underexplored, underappreciated, and largely untold story. Dynamics of Rural Growth in Bangladesh: Sustaining Poverty Reduction tells that story and inquires what specific actions Bangladesh might take--given the residual poverty and persistent malnutrition--to accelerate and channel its rural dynamism to sustain the gains in eliminating poverty, achieving shared prosperity,...