Catching Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind

The Journal of Economic History

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 1986, Pages 385-406

  Abramovitz, Moses ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972048097     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: 14716372     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700046209     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development (New York, 1982). Maddison's estimates of productivity levels are themselves extrapolations of base levels established for most, but not all, the countries by
2. Irving B. Kravis, Alan Heston, and Robert Summers in their International Comparisons of Real Product and Purchasing Power (Baltimore, 1978) and in other publications by Kravis and his associates.
3. W.E.G. Salter, Productivity and Technical Change (Cambridge, 1960) provides a rigorous theoretical exposition of the factors determining rates of turnover and those governing the relation between productivity with capital embodying best practice and average (economically efficient) technology.
4. Japanese Economic Growth: Trend Acceleration in the Twentieth Century (Stanford, 1973), especially chap. 9.
5. Moses Abramovitz, “Rapid Growth Potential and its Realization: The Experience of the Capitalist Economies in the Postwar Period,” in Edmond Malinvaud, ed., Economic Growth and Resources, Proceedings of the Fifth World Congress of the International Economic Association, vol. 1 (London, 1979), pp. 1–30.
6. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1915), p. 70.
7. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Fall of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities (New Haven, 1982).
8. Kravis et al., International Comparisons;
9. Edward F. Denison, assisted by Jean-Pierre Poullier, Why Growth Rates Differ, Postwar Experience of Nine Western Countries (Washington, D.C., 1967). pp. 239–45.
10. R.C.O. Matthews, Review of Denison (1967), Economic Journal (June 1969), pp. 261–68.
11. My paper cited earlier describes the operation of these factors in the 1950s and 1960s and tries to show how they worked to permit productivity growth to rise in so many countries rapidly, in concert and for such an extended period (“Rapid Growth Potential and Its Realization,” pp. 18–30).
12. Maddison, Phases, Table C5.
13. See also William J. Baumol, “Productivity Growth, Convergence and Welfare: What the Long-run Data Show,” C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University, Research Report No. 85–27, August 1985.
14. See Abramovitz, “Rapid Growth Potential and its Realization.”
15. Olson, Rise and Fall.
16. Some comments on the catch-up process after 1973 may be found in Abramovitz, “Catching Up and Falling Behind” (Stockholm, 1986), pp. 33–39.
17. The possibility of overtaking and surpassing, however, was considered theoretically by Edward Ames and Nathan Rosenberg in a closely reasoned and persuasive article, “Changing Technological Leadership and Industrial Growth,” Economic Journal, 72 (1963), pp. 13–31. They conclude that the troubles connected with leadership and industrial “aging” that doom early leaders to decline in the productivity scale are not persuasive. They hold that outcomes turn on a variety of empirical conditions, the presence of which is uncertain and not foreordained.
18. These arguments are anticipated and elaborated in Nathan Rosenberg's fertile and original paper, “Why in America?”, in Otto Mayr and Robert Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, D.C., 1981).
19. See also R.C.O. Matthews, Charles Feinstein, and John Odling-Smee, British Economic Growth, 1856–1973 (Stanford, 1983), chaps. 14, 15, 17. Their analysis does not find a large effect on British productivity growth from 1870 to 1913.
20. Charles P. Kindleberger, “Obsolescence and Technical Change,” Oxford Institute of Statistics Bulletin (Aug. 1961), pp. 281–97.
21. These and similar questions are raised by experienced observers of American business. They are well summarized by Edward Denison, Trends in American Economic Growth, 1929–1982, (Washington, D.C., 1985), chap. 3.
22. Representative arguments supporting the idea that social capability has suffered, together with some quantitative evidence, may be found in Olson, Rise and Fall;
23. William Fellner, “The Declining Growth of American Productivity: An Introductory Note,” in W. Fellner, ed., Contemporary Economic Problems, 1979 (Washington, D.C., 1979); and
24. Assar Lindbeck, “Limits to the Welfare State,” Challenge (Dec. 1985). For argument and evidence on the other side, see
25. Sheldon Danzigar, Robert Haveman and Robert Plotnick, “How Income Transfers Affect Work, Savings and Income Distribution, Journal of Economic Literature, 19 (Sept. 1982), pp. 975–1028; and
26. Edw. F. Denison, Accounting for Slower Economic Growth (Washington, D.C., 1979), pp. 127–38.
27. See R. D. Norton, “Regional Life Cycles and US Industrial Rejuvenation,” in Herbert Giersch, ed., Towards an Explanation of Economic Growth (Tübingen, 1981), pp. 253–80; and
28. R. D. Norton, “Industrial Policy and American Renewal,” Journal of Economic Literature, 24 (March 1986).