This book studies the impact of different sources of external finance on growth and development in different country contexts. An important finding of the study is that 'success' or 'failure' in the productive use of external and domestic financial resources cannot be explained on the basis of single factors such as external shocks or 'bad' versus 'sound' policies. Rather, they are outcomes of complex interactions between changes in exogenous factors (such as fluctuations in external finance and trade shocks), existing economic structures and the responses to shocks by domestic public and...

The dismal experience of many developing countries with the use of large inflows of commercial bank loans and official development assistance in the 1970s and 1980s has manifested the continuous external vulnerability of their economies. This study provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the international aspects of development finance, Credit-rationing rules set by bank managers and donor governments, together with uncoordinated macroeconomic policies in the industrialized world, tend to create unstable and inadequate external financing conditions for the developing world....

Between 1987 and 1990 Thailand experienced double-digit growth, fed by high capital inflows. This made Thailand one of the first developing countries to recover from the recession of the 1980s. Since 1990 growth and capital inflows have continued at a high level. The book makes a detailed study of the macroeconomic impact of capital inflows during recent years and during an earlier period when growth, and capital inflows, were high, in the late 1970s. It is shown that the results of the recent period are more sustainable than those of the earlier period, due to the differences in the nature...