Advantage After The National Development Path,

Historically, there are many examples of catching-up and falling-behind among nations. In the 14th century, Europe grown up from the lowest level and caught up China; at the beginning of the 19th century, England surpassed the Netherlands and became the first industrialized country in the world; the USA took the place of England as the first leader at the turning of 20 century; although hardly damaged by the two world wars, Japan recovered quickly and became the second strongest economy in capitalism powers in 20 years, and so on. Therefore,"once behind is not always behind". However, there is another group of countries whose economy is deteriorating since the Golden age; it includes 168 countries, account for one thirds of the world. In the last quarter of the 20th century, GDP per capita in Africa is stagnant, GNP in many Latin American and Asian countries increase slowly, too. They didn't shorten the gap between them and the advanced countries, but enlarged it.In general, there are two trends of backward countries'development. The first, they can avail oneself of the advantages of backwardness to accelerate the development, shorten the gap, and catch up the forward countries; the second, they are restrained by the disadvantages of backwardness, make economy step in stagnant or even reverse, and enlarge the gap. In all, we can get two conclusions: advantages of backwardness exist impersonally; and there need some conditions to realize it.The paper tries to disclose the intrinsic mechanism of the catching-up, explore how the advantages of backwardness works in different economic growth stage, why for most situation, the gap between the poor and the rich become larger and larger, for some minority, they can suddenly rise up and step into the group of the developed countries, and find the best developing way for the backward countries.There are 5 parts in the paper.The first chapter gives review to theories of backwardness. The deficiencies of those researches and the direction of my paper are pointed out.The second chapter is the theoretic hypothesis of advantages of backwardness.