As part of the efforts by the international donor community to scale up aid to Africa, substantial debt relief has been granted in recent years through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) and its successor, the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). This paper examines a sample of 24 African countries that have at least reached decision point status in the HIPC Initiative, and attempts to assess to what extent this debt relief has created fiscal space in recipient countries' budgets, and what, on average, the effects of actual fiscal response have been, relative to other types of aid. Based on the fiscal response literature, we model public finance behavior as a system of structural equations and estimate the reduced form parameters in a vector autoregressive (VAR) framework. In general, we were unable to find evidence that substantiates the concerns that debt relief might provoke no or even perverse fiscal responses. On average, debt relief affects public finance behavior in a desirable way, with effects being most similar to those of its most direct substitute, namely program grants.