DEFINITION AND TIMING

After take-off there follows what might be called the drive to maturity. There are a variety of ways a stage of economic maturity might be defined: but for these purposes we define it as the period when a society has effectively applied the range of (then) modern technology to the bulk of its resources.

In terms of sectoral development the drive to maturity sees the industrial process differentiated, with new leading sectors gathering momentum to supplant the older leading sectors of the take-off, where deceleration has increasingly slowed the pace of expansion. After the railway take-offs of the third quarter of the nineteenth century—with coal, iron, and heavy engineering at the centre of the growth process—it is steel, the new ships, chemicals, electricity, and the products of the modern machine-tool that come to dominate the economy and sustain the overall rate of growth. This is also, essentially, the case with the later Russian drive to maturity, after 1929. But in Sweden after 1890 it was the evolution from timber to wood-pulp and paper; from ore to high-grade steel and finely machined metal products. The leading sectors in the drive to maturity will be determined, then, not merely by the pool of technology but by the nature of resource endowments; by the character of the take-off, and the forces it sets in motion; and it may be shaped to a degree, as well, by the policies of governments.