The archive.

Foreign aid, in this MIT report, is a temporary instrument for crossing a threshold, not a permanent redistribution of income. Rosenstein-Rodan judges assistance less by the income it creates per dollar than by the additional domestic effort it elicits, higher marginal savings, bolder planning, stronger administration, arguing that a marginal savings rate well above the average is the main lever of any development program. Absorptive capacity, broadly defined to include skilled labor, entrepreneurship, and public administration, sets the amount a country can use well, while repayment capacity should govern the terms, whether grants, soft loans, or local-currency schemes. He distinguishes aid sharply from ordinary capital flows, proposes burden-sharing among donors on a progressive-income principle that would place the largest share on the United States, and closes with country-by-country projections of capital requirements to 1976.

"Foreign Capital Inflow" and "Aid" are not synonymous terms.

Planning becomes meaningful only when it openly ranks competing ends: growth against present consumption, employment against future surplus, equality against efficiency. Rosenstein-Rodan reads India's Five Year Plans less as a statistical exercise than as a theory of democratic development under scarcity, in which a poor society must decide how much the present generation may be asked to forgo for the sake of the future. He treats unemployment and the rural-urban divide as central inequalities rather than side effects, defends general education as social overhead capital whose returns are delayed but transformative, and argues that industrial concentration, often unavoidable where capital and markets are thin, must be restrained by taxation and public investment rather than by price controls. A socialist pattern, on his account, cannot mean redistribution alone, nor can development mean growth alone.

A series of choices between eating ('somewhat' or 'much') less today for the sake of eating ('somewhat' or 'much') more tomorrow has to be made.

Change one assumption—that India needs three units of capital to yield one of output, not the 2.2 the Pant and Little memoranda supposed—and the arithmetic of the Third Five Year Plan turns forbidding. Working through three numerical models for 1960 to 1966, Rosenstein-Rodan shows how heavily national income, taxation, borrowing and required savings all hinge on this single ratio. Model b, demanding a 38 percent marginal savings rate on meagre foreign aid, he dismisses as a reductio ad absurdum; a plausible rate lies nearer 23 percent. His preferred model c couples the realistic 3:1 ratio with substantially higher aid—some 3,000 crores—as the only path to 4.8 percent annual growth without crushing austerity. A quiet lesson in how development plans live or die by their coefficients.

The assumption of a capital-output ratio 2·2:1 seems, however, to be dangerously optimistic.

In 1956 nuclear power seemed a natural answer for coal-poor, grid-rich economies like Europe and Japan; three years later, Rosenstein-Rodan argues, that case had quietly collapsed as coal and oil cheapened and technical progress favoured conventional thermal plants instead. Turning to underdeveloped countries, he marshals four structural objections—reactors demand large generating units, dependable grids, very high base-load factors, and punishing capital intensity—and insists India apply a shadow interest rate near 10 percent. Recomputed on realistic load factors, coal-fired power comes out 50 to 60 percent cheaper than nuclear. The essay dismantles H. J. Bhabha's proposed million-kilowatt programme and the optimism surrounding third-generation thorium reactors, counselling India to wait rather than sink scarce capital into uneconomic early plants it could ill afford.

When a man is hungry he may pay a high price for a meal, but he should not proceed to buy a restaurant.