External Finance And Adjustment

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 private sector agents. This finding also implies that there are no recipes in economic policy-making which are generally applicable; the 'best' policy has to be designed specifically for each country.

One of the most important and controversial challenges feeing the international financial and trading system is the need for developing countries to meet their high and rapidly growing external debt obligations and foreign exchange requirements. Developing countries have suffered major shocks in the form of global recession, high real interest rates, weakened terms of trade, and rising protectionism against their exports. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, Western central banks, and private financial institutions are seeking to avoid a collapse of the international financial system, and developing countries are seeking to grow through increased trade and access to external financing. Yet the fragility of current international trade and monetary systems seriously threatens the achievement of both sets of objectives. Professor Loxley integrates the structural adjustment experience of Third World countries with the policies, practices, and relationships of external financial agents in his discussion of options for reforming policy and of the limitations inherent in implementing these reforms.

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 of capital inflows, in external conditions, and in economic policies.

There are many challenges facing the economies of developing countries. Capital volatility, financial crises, aid, debt and the IMF are all issues that have received a great deal of attention over recent years. In International Finance and The Developing Economies , Graham Bird provides an essentially non-technical discussion of these issues, examining the underlying political economy and discussing the policy alternatives that are available.

"Gross stocks of foreign assets have increased rapidly relative to national outputs since 1990, and the short-run capital gains and losses on those assets can amount to significant fractions of GDP. These fluctuations in asset values render the national income and product account measure of the current account balance increasingly inadequate as a summary of the change in a country's net foreign assets. Nonetheless, unusually large current account imbalances, especially deficits, should remain high on policymakers' list of concerns, even for the richer and less credit-constrained countries. Extreme imbalances signal the need for large and perhaps abrupt real exchange rate changes in the future, changes that might have undesired political and financial consequences given the incompleteness of domestic and international asset markets. Furthermore, of the two sources of the change in net foreign assets -- the current account and the capital gain on the net foreign asset position -- the former is better understood and more amenable to policy influence. Systematic government attempts to manipulate international asset values in order to change the net foreign asset position could have a destabilizing effect on market expectations"--NBER website