Rostow's Stages of Growth - Criticism of The Model

Criticism of The Model

1. Rostow is historical in the sense that the end result is known at the outset and is derived from the historical geography of a developed, bureaucratic society.
2. Rostow is mechanical in the sense that the underlying motor of change is not disclosed and therefore the stages become little more than a classificatory system based on data from developed countries.
3. His model is based on American and European history and defines the American norm of high mass consumption as integral to the economic development process of all industrialized societies.
4. His model assumes the inevitable adoption of Neoliberal trade policies which allow the manufacturing base of a given advanced polity to be relocated to lower-wage regions.
5. Rostows Model does not apply to the Asian and the African countries as events in these countries are not justified in any stage of his model.
6. The stages are not identifiable properly as the conditions of the take-off and pre take-off stage are every similar and also overlap.
7. According to Rostow growth becomes automatic by the time it reaches the maturity stage but Kuznets asserts that no growth can be automatic there is need for push always.
8. There are two unrelated theories of take off one is that take is a sectoral and a non-linear notion and other is that it is highly aggregative.

Rostow's thesis is biased towards a western model of modernization, but at the time of Rostow the world's only mature economies were in the west, and no controlled economies were in the "era of high mass consumption." The model de-emphasizes differences between sectors in capitalistic vs. communistic societies, but seems to innately recognize that modernization can be achieved in different ways in different types of economies.

The most disabling assumption that Rostow has taken is of trying to fit economic progress into a linear system. This assumption is false as due to empirical evidence of many countries making false starts then reaching a degree of progress and change and then slipping back. E.g.: In the case of contemporary Russia slipping back from high mass consumption to a country in transition the main cause being political change and environment and also Cold War.

Another problem that Rostow’s work has is that it considered large countries with a large population (Japan), with natural resources available at just the right time in its history (Coal in Northern European countries), or with a large land mass (Argentina). He has little to say and indeed offers little hope for small countries, such as Rwanda, which do not have such advantages. Neo-liberal economic theory to Rostow, and many others, does offer hope to much of the world that economic maturity is coming and the age of high mass consumption is nigh. But that does leave a sort of 'grim meathook future' for the outliers, which do not have the resources, political will, or external backing to become competitive. (See Dependency theory)