Chapter 44: World Development in Historical Perspective

Douglas O. Walker

World development in historical perspective Since the end of World War II, the world economy has been transformed from a devastated and fragmented assortment of national economies primarily engaged in producing a low level of basic commodities for local consumption into a unified set of product, factor, and financial markets of global dimensions generating a tremendous volume and variety of goods and services supporting a much higher level of living for the world's population. The combination of high population growth, a brisk pace in capital formation, ever widening markets, and accelerating technological advances led to a rapid rise in production with corresponding large-scale changes in productive structures and patterns of international trade. More than a half century after this transformation began, in the early years of a new millennium, the world economic landscape is markedly different from the scene of destruction, war weariness, and backwardness presented at the end of ...

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