ABSTRACT
The issues raised by such a provocative title deserve to be tackled operationally, rather than methodologically, in terms of the business of economic history. But certain conceptual problems do exist and merit prior discussion. Clearly in the strict sense every country’s economic development has been a unique, one-off sequence, with distinguishing characteristics from all others. This will be true, in the absolute sense, of direct economic criteria—rates of inter-sectoral structural change, the exact mix of the constituents of industrial output, and the like—though the higher the degree of aggregation then the greater likelihood of statistical conformities existing between national case histories. The total rate of growth, or rate of investment or population growth may approximate in different instances; it is, however, much less likely that the disaggregated constituents of these conglomerate indices will conform: the share of industry, primary production, services, income from abroad which collectively make up an aggregate rate of growth; the exact mix of capital accumulation in different sectors which forms the aggregate investment rate; the balance of net migration and natural increase (itself a function of age-specific birth and death rates translated against age structures) which lies behind the rate of change of the aggregate population index. Tracking back a little further, we may rest even more assured that 4the more contextual aspects of economic growth have national specificity; and these, we are appreciating more and more clearly, are crucially important aspects—part and parcel—of the processes of economic change: institutional developments, political, legal, processes and the like; the extent and rapidity of urbanization, the pattern of resource endowment.
