In considering a second edition of The Stages of Economic Growth, a decade after its publication, I weighed the question of revising the text itself. For two reasons I decided to confine changes to this Preface and to Appendix B, ‘The critics and the evidence’.

First, the analytic bone-structure of the argument.

For reasons set out in Appendix B, I am not inclined to alter the basic approach to the stages of growth; and I regard the evidence accumulated over the past decade on the past and on the contemporary world as, on the whole, reinforcing, not weakening, the concept of stages of growth. This has been an extraordinarily fruitful decade of research in economic history and in the study of growth in the contemporary world. I would not for a moment argue that the text would be identical if it were written afresh. There are important bodies of data and analyses which I would certainly take into account. But I concluded this was best done through an Appendix rather than by rewriting the text.

The Stages of Economic Growth is an effort to map a large problem. It is not an encyclopedia of economic history. An effort to introduce, within its text, the new data available on the various nations and regions of the world would alter its character and purpose.

Despite the heat generated in certain portions of the debate about the stages of growth, the heart of the controversy lies in a quite straightforward technical difference of view: should growth be analysed in terms of broad aggregates (like GNP, the proportion of income invested, the proportion of GNP generated in primary, manufacturing, and service sectors, etc.)?