Research on developing countries over the past two decades has produced' an impressive body of evidence suggesting that there are important similarities, in the process of development among all countries. Cultural, political and social factors make their imprint on the development of individual countries, but thework of Kuznets, Chenery and others shows rather convincingly that key economic variables in the economy-the shares of industry, saving and government revenue in national income, for example-move in fairly predictable waysduring the process of growth. Chenery has shown through regression analysis. that just two economic variables-per capita income and foreign capital inflow -and one demographic variable-population size-are sufficient to explain a very high proportion of the differences in these structural characteristics among developing countries. (See Chenery [2]).
