rate of return on capital - Diane

Diane Monaco dmonaco at pop3.utoledo.edu
Tue Apr 23 12:10:55 PDT 2002


At 11:59 AM 4/19/2002 -0700, you wrote:


>1) Many developing countries have current account deficits which would
>imply accommodating capital account inflows...of course if everything
>freely flows."
>
>dlaw: I would consider whether the leakage of 3rd world savings into other
>currencies depresses the market for capital goods.

dlaw, thanks for the input. Certainly this is true. Investment must come from some saving source: either domestic or foreign. If domestic saving is low and there is very little foreign aid, foreign borrowing and foreign investment, there will be very little gross investment in the country.

Resource gap (gross domestic investment - gross domestic saving) values are high and increasing for low income countries:

Ethiopia 11 Mali 11 Tanzania 10 Ghana 10

The gaps in high income countries are obviously larger: UK, Japan, Germany are 1, -1, and -2 respectively. Large resource gaps have to be filled with something -- usually capital inflows from abroad. If foreign aid/borrowing/investment doesn't flow into the country, then the gap will surely close with decreased investment within. So I guess it's a story of either "filling" the gap or "closing" it.

Diane



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