Rostow's Theory Of Economic Development

The premise of Rostow’s theory of economic development is to explain how Western countries were able to develop, but not the rest of the world. This concept lays down the foundation for developing nations to follow in order to reach the acme of growth. Rostow’s concept focuses on domestic factors and divides societies into five stages of growth: the traditional society, the pre-take off stage, the take-off stage, maturity, and the age of mass consumption. In the traditional society the dominant industry is subsistence agriculture. Industry and production are limited due to a ceiling, which exists because the potentialities of modern science and technology are either not accessible or not applied systematically. Consequently, there is little

His omission of colonialism indicates the West was able to develop isolated, without the pilfering of precious resources and labor from their colonies. (M) Rostow instead attributes internalities, such as political structure or the resources of Europe, that allowed the West to possess the preconditions for take-off. Additionally, his empirical validity is discreditable by excluding the connection between former colonies and the struggle to develop in the past decades. Rostow fails to recognize that local conditions are influenced by outside factors such as the country’s position in the global economic hierarchy. (F) Rostow’s conception is incorrect primarily because he is explicit in his premise that underdevelopment is the original stage of all traditional societies, including Western countries. There is no country that fits the characteristics of his first stage; this tabula rasa view presumes that undeveloped societies today have not changed, when the opposite is evident. His stage approach is unrealistically static. According to Frank, this is especially apparent in Africa when society was completely changed by the slave trade and again later by colonizers. Any traces of the original ‘traditional society’ was obliterated by the history of developing countries and their relationship to their previous colonizers. According to Rostow, England was able to industrialize due to its favorable geography, but does not clarify if it is England’s geography or the geography of its numerous colonies such as Egypt that provided the cotton for British textile industries to grow. He ignores the connection between England being the first to industrialize and having the largest empire in the world in the late nineteenth century. (F) By being unable to accurately depict the reality of how the West was able to develop, Rostow fails