Growing foreign debt, low economic growth and falling export prices in the 1970s and 1980s led to a debt crisis in many poor countries: the combination of intolerable debt and severe balance of payments problems.
In 1992 according to the World Bank 33 of the most highly indebted poor countries had debts which over a period of ten years had doubled to more than six times their annual export revenues.
This was the impetus for a series of bilateral and multilateral initiatives for the rescheduling or relief of debts. These also included the German HIPC initiative at the Cologne G8 summit.
