One involves integrating the external financing of the E.I.B. with the European Commission's work, setting up a European agency for external financing.
"The need for external financing is definitely more urgent now than before," said Trevor Cullinan, a director at the ratings agency Standard & Poor's in Dubai.
The information asymmetries and the problems of signaling that affect the demand for external financing entail a prioritization of funding.
Energy efficiency projects which are not financed from internal resources of the energy saver and are interesting for external financing usually have payback periods of between 3 and 7 years.
As ODA currently makes up more than two-thirds of external finance for the least-developed countries (LDCs), donor countries have long been keen to use ODA as a lever to generate private investment and domestic tax revenues.
As in Japan, banks in the euro area are the prime source of external finance for the business sector.
The importance of migrants' remittances as a major source of external finance for developing countries has only recently received serious attention from international financial institutions such as the World Bank Kapur and McHale note "remittances have emerged as the latest cause célèbre among governments, foundations, and multilateral institutions" [ 2].
For some countries, the value of these remittances is among the most stable sources of external finance, even exceeding the official development aid flow [ 5].
