Rostow's Stages of Growth

American economist Walt Whitman Rostow set out his model in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), explicitly framing it as an alternative to Marxist theories of historical materialism during the Cold War. Rostow argued that every national economy passes through five sequential stages:

1. Traditional society — subsistence agriculture, limited technology, rigid social hierarchies.
2. Preconditions for take-off — commercial agriculture expands, infrastructure and banking emerge, often catalysed by external demand or colonial contact.
3. Take-off — a short period (Rostow suggested two to three decades) in which industrialisation becomes self-sustaining, savings and investment rise above roughly 10% of national income, and leading sectors (e.g. textiles, railways) pull the rest of the economy.
4. Drive to maturity — diversification of industry, adoption of advanced technology across sectors, integration into the world economy.
5. Age of high mass consumption — durable consumer goods dominate output, the service sector expands, and welfare provision grows.

Rostow illustrated take-off with cases such as Britain in the late 18th century, the United States from roughly 1843, and Japan from the 1880s. The model heavily influenced US foreign aid policy in the 1960s — Rostow himself served as National Security Advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson (1966–1969) — and underpinned the logic of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America.

Critics, particularly dependency theorists like Andre Gunder Frank and world-systems scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein, argue the model is Eurocentric, ignores colonial extraction and unequal exchange, and wrongly assumes the development path of early industrialisers is replicable. It also struggles to explain resource-curse economies, late industrialisers using state-led models, and post-industrial transitions. Despite these critiques, Rostow's stages remain a standard reference point in development economics syllabi and Model UN background guides.