ABSTRACT
The established industrial societies in the 1950s were centered in North America, western Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Eastern Europe, and Japan. Rapid industrial growth in the established industrial areas had several major consequences. For several decades after 1950, many people worried about the growing gap between the minority of advanced industrial economies and the rest of the world—though of course this division began to change by the 1980s. Sheer growth had an obvious impact, but the advanced industrial economies also introduced some important new features. As always, a series of technological changes lay at the heart of the new economy. The changing nature of the advanced industrial economies obviously affected the balance among major regions in the world, though the results were complex. The development of advanced industrial economies posed an obvious challenge for many of the new industrializers—just as, around 1900, changes in the industrial world created at least a temporary gap with newcomers like Japan.
