The bittersweet shadows of the Rostow Model
In a perfect world, every single country should have the capacity to thrive in a stage of economic high mass consumption. According to Rostow, every single country indeed has this potential. But has it? Looking at Third World countries that suffer politically as well as economically, it is not easy to be explicitly sure about a potential for everyone. Whilst Rostow’s Model was perceived in the 1960s as the ultimate answer to helping states modernize, it must be considered that it has had some serious drawbacks. The case study of Somalia will demonstrate and portray these drawbacks and therefore delineate why the Rostow Model is not the appropriate way to expose economic development of countries.
It can be said that for them it worked out the way Rostow predestinated it. Taking the USA as an example, it started with a Take off in 1850, reached the Drive to Maturity in 1920, and settled to a High Mass Consumption Stage in 1930. However, one must highly remember that when the USA or Western Europe started its drastic economic development, there were no other countries that were ahead of them. What they did was something new and there were not any other influences or countries that could have possibly taken advantage of them. So in this case, the Rostow Model indeed can be seen as an appropriate Model to portray economic development. However, it does not entirely work for developing countries, as it was Rostow’s original plan. One of the main arguments for that is that countries like Somalia that still happen to be in stage 2, which is not even the Take off stage, have too much competition around them. How can Somalia, for example, ever equally compete against a “High Mass Consumption” country like the USA? One could argue that Somalia does not necessarily need to compete in the economic market. However, the Rostow Model is a pure form of capitalism. How will independent capitalism and decolonized countries like Somalia ever go in one