Against the background of the international debt problem which originated with the oil shocks of the seventies, this book undertakes a theoretical analysis of the factors determining aggregate external debt, using the example of a raw material importing country. Instead of the usual static definition of the trade balance as the difference between the value of exports and imports in a single period, here an intertemporal approach is used with a country's current account balance determined as the difference between aggregate saving and aggregate net investment, variables which are primarily...