Foreign Capital and Domestic Planning

Abstract

Actors in a joint production who have been assigned a part but are invited to write their own script are under strong temptation to steal each other’s lines. In the hope of being able to avoid this temptation, I have defined the scope of this paper rather narrowly and have attempted to deal in the main with two questions. Assuming that a country has embarked on a course of planned economic development, what is the difference that will — and should — be made to its plans by the availability of foreign capital? And, if the absorption of foreign capital into a process of planned economic progress is to be as smooth and beneficial as possible, are there any conditions that the availability of foreign capital must satisfy? The focus clearly is on a poor country receiving capital from abroad both from private as well as public sources.