(FORTUNE Magazine) – It's almost a truism that world capital shortages loom during the Nineties as emerging market economies vie for funds with the industrial countries. Barry P. Bosworth thinks otherwise. A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former economic adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Bosworth tells FORTUNE's Louis S. Richman why: The main worry is covering America's current account deficit. Because its savings fell short during the Eighties, the U.S. depended on foreign capital to finance domestic investment. But as much as the U.S. needs to boost investment to remain competitive in the 1990s, American companies will be absorbed with paying down the excessive debt they've built up. New housing and office construction -- major absorbers of investment in the 1980s -- will slow. Labor force growth will average just over 1% a year in the next decade, and it doesn't appear that productivity growth will rise much above the 1% annual rate of the past several years. The U.S. is thus likely to have a long- * term growth rate putt-putting along at about 2% a year. You don't get much demand for capital out of that kind of economy. The foreign capital needs of the reforming economies don't amount to very much, and for the foreseeable future many aren't going to get the money anyway. As the fast-developing economies of Asia and Mexico demonstrate, it is a high domestic saving rate that provides the investment capital to fuel growth. Eastern Europe has nothing to sell to the rest of the world at prices that would enable it to finance significant foreign borrowing. The most it could think of getting from abroad is 5% of its roughly $600 billion national income. So we're talking $30 billion a year under the best of circumstances, no more than half in private direct investment. That's a trivial claim on global financial resources. The biggest mistake Western lenders could make would be to let these countries borrow now, since it would likely all go to finance domestic consumption. If developing countries can create the stability and confidence that will make their own populations willing to save, they will have no trouble attracting substantial private foreign funds.