The Covid-19 crisis has recently rekindled discussions about debt relief, leading official lenders to grant a moratorium on low-income countries’ external public debt service. Private creditors, which had massively invested in LICs (especially in Africa), have been so far relatively spared. But would they keep lending to these countries if a new wave of debt write-offs were to occur? Building on the two largest debt relief programs for LICs, namely the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), we investigate whether debt relief leads international private creditors to withdraw or to resume lending to beneficiary governments. Using a difference-in-differences approach, our results suggest that debt relief has fostered borrowing from private creditors, and identify the absence of reputational effects and the short-term horizon of private creditors as the key drivers that made renewed access to the credit market possible.

Covid-19危机最近重新引发了有关债务减免的讨论，导致官方贷方暂停执行低收入国家的对外公共债务服务。迄今为止，私人债权人已经对LICs（特别是在非洲）进行了大规模投资，相对而言幸免于难。但是，如果发生新一轮的债务冲销，它们会继续向这些国家提供贷款吗？基于低收入国家的两个最大债务减免计划，即重债穷国倡议（HIPC）和多边债务减免倡议（MDRI），我们研究了债务减免是否导致国际私人债权人撤回或恢复对受益政府的贷款。使用差异法，我们的结果表明，债务减免促进了从私人债权人的借款，