The Elements of Social Capability

Thanks to the work of several international agencies, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD, who provided the original data, and to the work of such pioneers as Colin Clark, Simon Kuznets, the Pennsylvania group (Irving Kyavis, Alan Heston, Robert Summers and their collaborators) and Angus Maddison, we now know immensely more about the economic growth of nations than we did only a very few decades ago. We can now say with some confidence that growth of per capita products at impressively rapid rates became the common experience of most of the people of the world during the years since World War II. This progress was shared both by the industrialized countries that had been advancing for a long time and also by many of the less developed countries that have become partly industrialized as well as by other countries in still earlier stages of development.