The Dictionary of Human Geography

 Thedifferences and merits of balanced and
unbalanced growth, and how each was
related to the necessity for a ‘big push’ to
trigger economic growth. Nurkse (1953),
like Rodenstein-Rodan, emphasized the
need for coordinated increase in the
amount of capital utilized in a wide range
of industries if industrialization was to be
achieved. Hirschmann (1958), while
agreeing with Nurske and others, also ar-
gued that unbalanced growth could,
through linkage effects, generate innov-
ations created by market responses to
shortage and surpluses.
 The potential, as Lewis (1984) indicated,
forsurplus labour as a stimulant to growthin
so-calleddual economies.
 The significance of saving at particular
historical moments in order to enter what
Rostow (Rostow) called the ‘take-off stage’
of industrialization.

Growth theory, from the vantage point of the
neo-liberalrevolution of the 1980s, appears

as an instance of Keynesian internationalism

in which market failures, planning, social cap-

ital and some aspects ofpolitical economy

are put to the service of ‘developing’ the

poorer nations of the world. All of these

growth theorists identified key developmental

issues – equilibrium, social overhead capital,

planning – which have continued to be ob-

jects of debate, and each (perhaps with the

exception of Rostow) contributed to both the

building of postwar multilateral development

institutions and to the idea, which in a way

was crushed by the weight of the Cold War, of

a sort of liberal developmental international-

ism (seeliberalism). In the 1980s, a ‘new

growth theory’ emerged in which endogenous

growth can occur especially through human

capital and new technologies (rather than

being assumed, as in neo-classical appro-

aches, by an exogenous savings rate or rate

of progress of technical change). mw

Suggested reading

Cypher and Dietz (1997); Preston (1996).

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GROWTH THEORY