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Industry has established itself as the leading sector in modern economic growth, accompanied by structural change. Sensible taxonomies and vocabularies defining the inputs and the intersectoral connections required to generate accelerated rates of industrial production have also been formulated and refined. Although the mechanisms through which these inputs' impact on growth are now understood, the sense in which they are separable and quantifiable components of a discernable historical process of sustained industrial development remains elusive. Net capital formation, the recruitment of better-skilled and more highly motivated labor, improved management, more efficient technology, optimal scale, and rational organization, aggressive marketing, and closer integration into a competitive international economy, an enhanced framework of supportive governmental policies, and so forth, will all be included in any discussion of the ''preconditions,'' ''requirements,'' or ''proximate determinants'' for industrial growth. Yet how, when, and why they all interacted and generated sustained industrial growth remain key questions for historians and social scientists pondering the very large fact that, after roughly three centuries of industrialization, the highest levels of industrial output per capita remain concentrated in roughly twenty to thirty national economies and support satisfactory standards of living for but a minority of the world's population.
Although several newly industrializing countries in the late twentieth century clearly entered the ''club'' of industrialized market economies and their levels of industrial productivity began to approach standards set by the leading industrial powers in Europe, North America, and Japan, there is no statistical evidence for any sustained worldwide process of convergence in levels of real wages or output per worker employed in manufacturing industry. On the contrary, divergence between an admittedly larger group of national economies that can be represented as industrialized and economically successful and those that are still ''underdeveloped'' may be increasing.
Given that a great deal has been revealed about the process of industrialization and the proximate factors required to promote it, the frequently posed question of why the whole world is still not industrialized deserves to remain high on the intellectual agenda; particularly as the industries of ''follower countries'' would seem to possess competitive advantages as and when they attempt to catch up. For example, countries with small and/or less efficient industrial sectors emulate and adapt the technologies and modes of organization that are demonstrably successful elsewhere in the world economy. They can borrow the funds and hire the technicians and managers required to establish modern industry on established international capital and labor markets. Their workers are cheap. Their natural resources are often underexploited. Their governments remain keen to promote and to subsidize the development and diversification of national industry. With misgivings they even welcome the plants and branches of multinational corporations. And yet, these advantages have not been enough.
It is now more than two to three centuries since Britain passed through the first industrial revolution, yet convergence has been slow, painful, and geographically constrained. Except at a rather banal level of generality, there is no short explanation of why many more countries are not industrialized. Students can and will be told that the small selection of national economies that followed Britain's lead (and particularly the twenty or so cases that eventually surpassed Britain's standards of industrial productivity) possessed or quickly built up something referred to as the ''social capability'' required to industrialize. Manifestly most other countries (which include within their borders the majority of the world's population) did not and have not acquired the requisite social capabilities.
Social capability is, however, little more than a portmanteau category that refers to cultures, values, family systems, political and legal institutions, religions, motivations, education, and skills embodied in national populations that, in combination, operated to inhibit or to facilitate the development of modern and efficient industrial sectors. Obviously at any point in time they appear as a heritage of national and/or local histories. Social capabilities can be pushed in required directions by governments, by other institutions, such as churches, schools, and industrial firms, and altered by material incentives to invest, develop, and work in industry. As a result of this link to the particular historical context, there is no substitute for studying successful cases of industrialization country by country and contrasting them with cases that came later to the endeavor and found greater difficulty in converging toward the macroeconomic structures and productivity levels of leading industrial powers. That is, there is no substitute for history.
Capitalism, assisted by positive help and incentives from governments, has triumphed as a so-called end to history. States everywhere seem committed to free enterprise, but it remains difficult to prescribe the right mix of policies for all national cases. Unless the current wave of protectionism intensifies, long established trends in the interdependence and integration of industry on a global scale look set to continue, and industries will become ever more cosmopolitan and dispersed in their locations. Although the range of technologies now available to late industrializers provides opportunities for unprecedented rates of structural change and rates of increase in labor productivities, perhaps no particular illumination can be derived from labeling industrialization as it proceeded at the end of the millennium as qualitatively different, or as a third or fourth industrial revolution.
For more than three centuries modern industry has adapted to opportunities provided by flows of new knowledge. Telematics, biotechnologies, robotics, and other novel technologies are just the latest wave requiring industries to restructure, to relocate, and to readapt to possibilities to satisfy mankind's seemingly insatiable demands for manufactured commodities. In this current phase of technological development, knowledge, human skills, capacities for coordination, and flexible responses to volatile, global markets seem to carry the kind of competitive advantages required during an earlier phase of industrialization, before that process became synonymous with large-scale corporations, fixed capital, and mass production. Nowadays success involves new and different political and social capabilities that are already shifting the concentrations of industrial activity away from Europe and North America and back to Asia.
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