Industrialization and growth : a comparative study / by Hollis Chenery, Sherman Robinson and Moshe Syrquin

Development is now conceived as the successful transformation of the structure of an economy. In his historical studies of modern economic growth, Kuznets (1966) identified the shift of resources from agriculture to industry as the central feature of this transformation. While the postwar experience of developing countries shows industrialization to be highly correlated with rising income, it also reveals substantial differences due to resource endowments and government policies.

The causal factors behind these relations are a matter of dispute. The sources of industrialization range from the need to adapt the composition of supply to shifts in domestic demand to the exploitation of comparative advantage in labor-intensive activities. In the past decade such historical trends have been modified as some countries have accelerated their indus trialization to offset worsening terms of trade, while favored primary producers have suffered from "Dutch disease" and a tendency to deindus trialize. Both the long-term tendency of middle-income countries to indus trialize and variations from it need to be evaluated in designing develop ment policy.

The present volume is one of a series of studies of the structural trans formation that have been supported by the World Bank. Earlier work by Chenery and Syrquin (1975, 1980) extended the Kuznets research pro gram to cover the postwar development patterns of lower-income coun tries and also developed a methodology for comparing the sources of industrialization in different economies. A broader approach to the analy sis of structural change, using a general equilibrium framework, was developed by Dervis, de Melo, and Robinson (1982); this enabled them to compare the effects of different policies. These two lines of analysis have been consolidated in the present volume, which tries to explain the post war experience of semi-industrial countries.