Regional Growth and Structural Change in Victorian Britain

Abstract

Does this mean that the patterns of economic development, diverse at national level, are vastly greater at regional level, and that disaggregation simply adds confusion to the attempt to explain growth? Recent work suggests that economic development, at national level, does not produce the infinity of patterns which historians have sometimes suggested, but that there are a small number of basic types of development. The investigations of Chenery and others into the development patterns of a large number of Third World countries in the post1950 period found that modern economic development is primarily influenced by country size, factor endowments, and availability of capital. Three types of development were identified: large countries with low ratios of trade to GNP and usually a low capital inflow; small countries with a relative specialization in the export of primary products; and small countries with a relative specialization in the export of manufactures.2 Thus, while smaller countries grew through exportoriented development, the larger countries were sustained by higher levels of internal demand, and trade dependency was limited by import substitution. If, as these studies suggest, economic development is a reproducible experience with a limited number of patterns, then this should be true at regional as well as at national aggregate level. The appropriate measure by which regional types may be identified lies in the analysis and comparison of economic structures. In his extensive studies of the process of modern economic growth, Kuznets focused upon economic structure