Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

The issue of financing development in developing countries is at the heart of this thesis. The latter revolves around four chapters on financing development related matters. The chapter 1 explores how fiscal episodes in the main traditional OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) donors affect their supply of development aid towards developing countries. Evidence is shown that fiscal episodes affect significantly aid supply, with a behavioural difference between European Union and Non-European countries in terms of aid supply. The chapter 2 deals with the consequences of development aid unpredictability and migrants' remittances on fiscal consolidation in developing countries. We find evidence that while migrants' remittances exert a positive and significant effect on the likelihood of fiscal consolidation in developing countries, development aid unpredictability does not. These results particularly suggest that a better management of the revenues derived from these private transfers during their booms could help avoid such situations and allow greater room of maneuver for governments’ recipients to implement countercyclical measures during bad times. The chapter 3 investigates whether the structural vulnerability of developing countries matters for their public indebtedness and evidence is obtained that it does. More specifically, we observe the existence of U-curve relationship between this structural vulnerability and the total public debt of these countries. Focusing on the specific case of CFA Franc Zone countries in chapter 4, we examine the relationship between the structural vulnerability and the probability of entering into excessive public debt. We also obtain evidence of a nonlinear effect of the structural vulnerability indicator with respect to the probability of entering into excessive debt: a rise in the structural vulnerability of these countries increases their probability to engage into excessive debt; however this probability declines after a certain threshold of their structural vulnerability. These results (both for developing countries and particularly for CFA Franc Zone countries) suggest that international development institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) should take into account such vulnerability in their assessment of the adequate development policies and recommendations - especially those related to debt issues -, to these countries.