Pathways to industrialization in the twenty-first century : new challenges and emerging paradigms

Abstract

This book is about the past, present, and future role of industrialization in economic development. Industrialization refers to the sustained structural transformation of a traditional economy into a modern economy driven by high-productivity activities in manufacturing. It has been the defining feature of the ‘great take-off ’, that is to say the period since the mid-eighteenth century, when first Britain, then other European countries and the USA underwent a historically rapid phase of economic development, followed in the twentieth century by Japan, the East Asian Tigers, and most recently China.