IN THE MID-1950s Simon Kuznets, the Nobel prize economist, was requested by the United Nations to compare “the present situation in underdeveloped countries with the earlier situation of the more developed countries, with special reference to the factors that seem … to be critical in respect of potentialities of development.” Kuznets started his task with a rather long statement of the difficulty in chronologically identifying periods in the history of the economically advanced countries of the West during which their situation was comparable with that of the then underdeveloped countries. The difficulty was partly self-imposed by the initially chosen criterion for the comparison – a period in history during which the industrialized Western countries,

Kuznets recognized that for several centuries up to the fifteenth the Western economies “lagged behind most of the economies of the Near and Far East,” but considered the period too distant for him to handle competently. Ultimately, he settled for relative levels of industrial development, measured in terms of the ratios of the labor force employed in agriculture and industry, to determine the comparable situation for his task.