Oscar Garavello

Still-to-day «financing gap models» are currently utilized to calculate the need of foreign resources to fill the gap between the required investment and available resources in the short-run. The macroeconomic rationale for aid relates to its ability to increase domestic savings (savings gap), foreign exchange (external gap) and government revenue (fiscal gap) in order to achieve the target growth rate. Yet, financial gap growth models fail the large majority of the empirical tests performed since the early nineties. The new paradigm argues that aid is effective to close the gap in the long-run only if domestic policies are appropriate to mobilize domestic private savings, to create a macroenvironment conducive to export growth/import substitution and to improve public expenditure management (policy gap models).