Three decades of industrialization

Abstract

Economists have long searched for patterns that relate successful development to structure and policy. This article reviews the experience of growth and industrialization in the postwar period in more than 100 economies, drawing on time-series data over a three-decade period. Economies are classified according to their population size, the share of primary or manufactured goods in their exports, and the weight of exports in gross domestic product (GDP). We examine the composition of demand, trade, output, manufacturing type, and factor use overall and between sectors as they relate to income growth. Higher income growth and more marked transformation are found among the groups with large populations, a predominance of manufactures in exports, and a larger role of exports. We also find that the patterns suggested by cross-country analysis are robust when tested using the time series data now available. Although development experiences may vary over time and across countries, there is sufficient uniformity within them for the main features of structural transformation to emerge as clear and consistent patterns of modern economic growth. Since its origins in the 1950s, the study of development economics has been concerned with similarities in the way countries grow. Uniform features of the development process, commonly known as "stylized facts of development," have been identified, but significant questions about the common processes remain and are addressed here. We draw on time-series data from three decades of observation to examine whether the patterns emerging from cross-country comparisons of structure and level of development actually reflect transforma-tions that occur over time. This work also brings to light some of the causes of the typical shifts in the composition of production and employment as incomes rise. And finally, we begin to separate out the differential patterns linking economic growth to initial conditions and to development policies. Early studies on these patterns were conducted by Clark (1940), Kuznets

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 82 citations exist upstream.