ABSTRACT
The expansion of industrial economies after the mid-twentieth century embraced several developments, though dramatic new industrial revolutions were at the forefront. The integration of parts of southern Europe and Eastern Europe (for example, Romania) with the industrial economies of western Europe and the Soviet Union, respectively, extended the industrial orbit. South Korea, the most obvious exemplar of Pacific Rim industrial revolutions, emerged in the 1980s as the most important industrial economy in the region after that of Japan. Government support combined with active business entrepreneurship to create huge industrial firms from about 1960 onward. Industrial growth in China, as in other evolving economies, brought new wealth to many people. India’s industrial growth was steadier than China’s after World War II, but it took a new turn slightly later, in the 1990s. Both India and China had broken earlier patterns of economic lag, in many ways regaining, on dramatically new industrial bases, their more traditional manufacturing role in the world economy.
