ABSTRACT
Aid, and the rationale for providing it, has evolved through several phases, which are presented as ‘aid ages’. The role of aid was to bridge the domestic resource gaps of the developing countries by raising the rates of productive investment. A further refinement of Walter W. Rostow was developed in 1966 by Hollis Chenery and A. Strout, outlining the role for aid more comprehensively. Aid from the Soviet bloc carried many of the same proclivities and it came in similar wrappers. For the decade of the 1970s as a whole, Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) aid was equivalent to one quarter of the total from the OECD countries, although it has diminished drastically since. The marketeers contended that aid was superfluous in a global economy increasingly dominated by private capital. Politically, however, aid retained its respectability, gaining wider official acceptance as a legitimate form of compensation for disadvantage.
