Comment

Abstract

This excellent and substantial paper rests on a broad hypothesis that will be familiar to everyone who knows Chenery’s work. The hypothesis is that modern economic development is an identifiable process of growth and change whose main features are the same in all countries, past and near future. This does not mean that the same events, in the same magnitudes, must happen in the same sequence everywhere. Chenery does not claim that economic development is as pre-programmed as the life-cycle of the salmon. There is room for local variation because of different local conditions; I will list some of those in a moment. But it does mean that newly developing countries can learn from the historical experience of old developed countries (except for one very important circumstance: the new countries must inevitably develop and industrialise, as the old ones did not, in a world that already contains many large developed countries). This has some relevance to the questions raised by Professor Mabogunje.