Walt Whitman Rostow's Stages Of Economic Growth

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ROSTOW’S STAGES OF GROWTH
Walt Whitman Rostow, with his work stages of Economic Growth, ushered a new age of writing on "modernization theory." His work has been greatly appreciated, debated and criticize. He subtitled this work as ‘A Non-Communist Manifesto’ suggesting that he intended for it to be an alternative to Marxism. His work has been popular in development studies and particularly used by the Kennedy and the Johnson Administrations in the United States to justify aid to the Third World.
Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth attempt to identify the key variables in the process of world economic history and the resulting stage of economic growth. It combines economics and history and Rostow claims that these stages can be used to explain the course of economic history and also yield predictions for the future.
He specifies 5 different stages. The first stage is the traditional society in which the economy functions within a limited production function. It is a primitive society, a central feature of which is that there is an upper ceiling to the level of attainable output per head. The society is mainly dependent on the natural factor endowment however, it is not static and keeps growing and changing. The next stage is the stage where the preconditions for take-off are established. This period is a transition from a traditional society to a better production function to enable it to use modern science and fend off diminishing returns. This stage is characterized by an

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