The Stages of Economic Growth

This book is a generalisation from the whole span of modern history. It gives an account of economic growth, based on a dynamic theory of production and interpreted in terms of actual societies. It helps to explain historical changes and to predict major political and economic trends: and it provides the significant links between economic and non-economic behaviour which Karl Marx failed to discern.

Professor Rostow distinguishes five basic stages of economic growth. He explains each stage in detail, and gives illustrative examples. In particular, he takes two superficially very different economies—those of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.—and exhibits in their history the same five stages of growth. He shows, further, the relationship between, military aggression and economic growth. Turning to current problems, he considers how far the concept of stages of growth may help us to cope with the nuclear arms race, and the problems of organising a world which will soon contain many new economically mature nations.

Professor Rostow does not subscribe to the Marxist view that history is uniquely determined by economic forces and motives; instead he offers a comprehensive, realistic and soundly based alternative to Marx’s theory of how societies evolve.