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p The growth of human resources in the much contracted postwar capitalist world economy has been unparalleled in scale. The population of all its countries increased by more than 1,350 million in 1950-80, which was more than double the corresponding figure for the first half of the century (620 million). As a result the total population of the capitalist and developing countries was nearly 3,000 million at the beginning of the 80s (as against only a little more than 1,600 million at the beginning of the 50s and 1,000 million at the beginning of the century). In other words, human 119 resources increased by 80 per cent between 1950 and 1980 within the non-socialist world, and by roughly 190 per cent since the beginning of the century.  [119•1 

p These considerable changes were determined to a crucial extent by the ’demographic explosion’, whose causes are linked with the break-up of the colonial system and advances in health protection. These points have been widely discussed in Soviet socio-economic literature,  [119•2  so we shall touch here only on those consequences of population growth that characterise its distribution in the principal regions of the capitalist world and are essential for understanding the shifts in the distribution of manpower among them, and consequently of the long-term trends in the development of their basic productive force.

p The following facts come out immediately from a comparison of these shifts: in the 50s, 60s, and 70s the rate of population increase in the developed capitalist countries (1.05 per cent) was 60 per cent lower on the whole than in the developing countries (2.5 per cent), so that during those years the number of their inhabitants rose by 215 million, while the numbers in the periphery rose by more than 1,200 million for the years covered by Fig. 7. Thus about 85 per cent of the total increase occurred in the developing countries.

p Such an immense disproportion has not, by any means, been typical of the whole period of the development of capitalism’s world system. Estimates based on UN demographic statistics indicate that even at the beginning of this century the growth rate of the metropolitan countries was patently higher than in the colonies and dependent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where 120 epidemics raged and hunger and high infant mortality prevailed. The expectation of life in the latter was about half that in the metropolitan countries. The demographic indices of the two groups, it is true, had already begun to even out between the wars, and over the period 1900-1938 their average annual population growth rates converged and
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Fig- 7 Dynamics of the population of the main regions of the capitalist economy * 1981 * within the present-day boundaries Sources: as for Table 9.
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were around 0.8 to 0.9 per cent, but because the population of the colonial world was roughly double that of the 121 industrial centres in absolute terms, the increases were respectively 250 million and 140 million.

p Since the war there has been a marked exacerbation of the demographic situation in the capitalist %orld. The rates of increase began to rise in the former colonial world. Tn 1938-50 they averaged 1.4 per cent a year, in the 50s 2.3 per cent, and in the 60s and 70s 2.6 per cent. In the developed capitalist countries the rates were also rather higher in the first postwar decades, but again began to fall and in the 70s were around 0.85 per cent a year, i.e. about the average for 1900-1938.

p The most populous centre of world capitalism has always been and still is Western Europe. At the middle of the century rather more than half of the total population of capitalist countries lived there, but the growth rate in most West European countries has been very low in recent decades compared with other geographical regions, while emigration has been very high, which has deepened the trend already long apparent toward a reduction of the weight of Western Europe’s population in both the capitalist countries as a group and the capitalist world as a whole.

p The population of the North American area increased much faster than Western Europe’s after the war. In the period 1950-81 its annual average growth rate was 1.30 per cent, which led to a certain convergence of the absolute size of the populations of the two main centres of capitalism. While the ratio between them was 1.7 : 1 in favour of Western Europe in the early 50s, it was 1.4 : 1 at the end of the 70s.

p One must remember, however, that the population of North America was increased in the first half of the century, and especially as a result of World War II, by a flow of immigrants from outside, including Western Europe, in addition to a rate of natural growth higher than in other developed capitalist countries. At the same time there was a high population growth rate in other capitalist countries, above all in the biggest of them, Japan, although it was also much lower than in the developing countries. A consequence of all these factors was a considerable decline in the weight of the industrial centres in the total population of today’s capitalist world (see Table 9).

p An even greater unevenness and extreme diversity of the dynamics of population growth characterise the present-day
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122 Table 9 Weight of the Principal Regions in the Total Population of the Capitalist W’orld (in percentages) Years Total Developed capitalist countries Developing countries _ . . Western North Total Europe America Others Total Asia Africa Amer’ica 1900 100.0 35.6 22.3 8.1 5.2 64.4 44.6 12.9 6.9 1938 100.0 35.7 19.0 10.1 6.6 64.3 43.1 12.6 8.6 1950 100.0 34.7 17.7 10.3 6.7 65.3 42.6 12.8 9.9 1960 100.0 32.4 15.8 10.2 6.4 67.6 43.6 13.2 10.5 1970 100.0 28.9 13.8 9.3 5.8 71.1 46.1 13.6 11.4 1981 100.0 25.5 11.7 8.2 5.6 74.5 47.5 14.6 12.4 Mean annual growth rates 1950-1981 1.9 1.2 0.8 1.8 1.4 2.3 2.3 2.2 2.5 1960-1970 1.6 1.1 0.8 1.4 1.6 2.6 2.5 2.6 2.9 1970-1981 2.1 0.8 0.6 0.8 1.5 2.5 2.5 2.7 2.7 Sources: UN World Population Prospects as Assessed in 1963’, ILO Bulletin of Labour Statistics. Labour Force and World Population Growth, UN Statistical Yearbook 1979; World Bank. World Development Report, 1981; UN Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, 1981, 1982. 123
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demographic situation in the developing countries. The bulk of their inhabitants has long been concentrated in the Asian region, in which more than two-fifths of the total population of the capitalist world lived at the biginning of the postwar period. The consequences of the ’demographic explosion’ showed themselves first in that region with the break-up of the colonial system. The number of its inhabitants approximately doubled in the decades reviewed, or increased by mora than 700 million, which was half of the total increment of population in the postwar capitalist world.

p The population of Africa (not counting South Africa) rose by 210 million, or more than doubled, in the same period, and its average annual growth rate began to exceed that of Asia in the 70s. These rates were not, however, limiting ones. Latin America set records of sorts, its population increasing by 120 per cent by the end of the 70s compared with the early 50s, with a mean annual growth rate of 2.75 per cent.

p These major shifts in the ratio of population among the various groups of countries convincingly emphasise the need to make careful allowance for the demographic factors when studying the long-term development trends of the productive forces in the postwar capitalist economy. And they are of special significance for a sectoral analysis of the results of the main regions’ economic development.

p At the same time these factors are extremely important for forecasting growth of the productive forces in any one economic system and on a global scale. The Soviet sociologist Arab-Ogly has justifiably commented that

p the tempestuous growth of population is one of the most important historical phenomena of our time as regards its remote consequences. It is facing both individual countries and mankind as a whole with a number of exceptionally complicated though in principle resolvable economic, social, and political problems. That is why there is an urgent need for substantiated and as exact as possible forecasts down to the year 2000. The compilation of such forecasts has now acquired universally acknowledged theoretical and practical significance. Demographic processes as a rule have immense inertia, which also makes it possible, strictly speaking, to make more or less substantiated forecasts of future populations.  [123•1 

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p The figures quoted above allow us to slate that the longterm trends in the area of population are more amenable to projection into the future than those of production, given the instability of development integrally inherent in the capitalist system, cyclic crises, feverish booms and slumps in market conditions, and so on. In spite of the marked rise in tempos in various countries and years, the dynamics of population growth is limited in the principal regions by quite definite parameters, which provides the necessary premises for a more or less long-term estimate of the future distribution of manpower among them.

p A real effort has been made in UN demographic publications to tie up population growth trends somehow with certain outlooks for the subsequent course of development of production. One of its surveys remarked, for instance:

p The future size, structure and distribution of population are essential for any plan that involves food, housing, employment’ education, health or other public services. This is also an era of increasing awareness: of man’s unprecedented growth, of the interaction between this growth and the environment, and of the possible implications for the future. Investigations into these complex relationships have added to the demand for population projections.  [124•1 

p For all the substantial differences in estimates of the future development of the international demographic situation, the majority of them quite validly, in our view, assume that one can hardly expect any extraordinary changes in growth rates in the really foreseeable term either in the capitalist or the developing countries compared with the postwar period, though some demographers’ forecasts assume a certain lowering of these rates in coming years.  [124•2 

p In any case, however, there are adequate grounds for 125 staling that the number of inhabitants of all the countries of the non-socialist world will increase by at least 50 per cent in the last two decades of the century (16 to 20 per cent in the first group and 56 to 60 per cent in the second). In absolute terms this means an increase in the population of the industrialised countries of roughly 120 to 150 million, and in the developing countries of 1,200 to 1,300 million.

p These estimates, like all similar generalising forecasts, are approximate, but in themselves they are very important not simply for understanding the outlooks for the development of population but even more for clarifying their interconnections with the possible trends of the future growth and distribution of the productive forces in the countries at present forming the world capilalisl system. Allowing for all that, some not uninteresting conclusions about the future follow from Table 9: above all the figures indicate that a progressive lowering of the weight of the population of the industrial centres compared with that of the developing countries can be expected. In all probability, whatever the variant, their proportion will fall to less than a quarter in the mid-80s and to nearly a fifth in the mid-90s, while it was more than a third at the beginning of the century. Further shifts can also be expected in the distribution of population within the capitalist countries. Whereas the manpower of Western Europe considerably predominated at the beginning of the century (roughly two-thirds) and equalled that of all the other capitalist countries taken together in the middle of the century, the ratio later began to tip in favour of countries outside Western Europe, where it is probable that up to two-thirds of the population of modern industrial centres will be living by the end of the century. The overwhelming part of their gainfully employed population will also consequently be in them, which needs to be taken into consideration when analysing the long-term outlook for the distribution of these centres’ production.

p The postwar period has been marked by a further increase in the unevenness of the distribution of the main productive force in the developing world. Most of its inhabitants, and so of its manpower, has long been concentrated, as we know, in Asia, whose weight in the total population of the capitalist world has been steadily rising in postwar decades. Analysis of current trends gives grounds for sugg-esting that the Asiatic population will be around half in the mid-80s, 126 and more than half in Ihe 90?, of the total population of the capitalist world within its present boundaries. But the majority of the liberated countries of Asia (in which more than 2,000 million people will probably be living at the end of the century, i.e. three times as many as in the middle of the century) are now the most backward areas, economically speaking, of the developing world. The population of Africa and Latin America is increasing even faster.

p These expected shifts arc undoubtedly fraught with serious socio-economic consequences for the fate of capitalism in those areas. In coming decades jobs will have to be created in them for hundreds and hundreds of millions of people, but their agriculture is already unable to absorb any considerable part of the flood of new labour power.

p The objectively operating laws of agricultural production, moreover, are leading to surplus manpower being pushed out into the towns which, given capitalist relations of production, inevitably means a growth of poverty and proletarianisation of broad masses of the peasantry. That is one of the important distinguishing features of capitalism compared with the exploiter formations that preceded it. The law of faster growth of the urban population under the capitalist mode of production, Lenin stressed, ’does not and cannot operate otherwise than through the disintegration of the peasantry into a bourgeoisie and a proletariat’.  [126•1 

p When that conclusion was drawn there was still no socialist economic system. Experience of its development has shown that for it advance of society’s productive forces is inseparably linked with priority growth of the urban population, but it also indicates that the new mode of production, unlike the capitalist, makes it possible to avoid the extremely grave consequences of urbanisation for the broad masses objectively inevitable for all capitalist countries.

p Since the war urbanisation has intensified to an unusual degree under the impact of the shifts in the structure of social production considered above. It has begun to have an ever more active effect on the character of the distribution of manpower in the world capitalist economy. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s the urban population of non-socialist countries more than doubled, so that the ratio of urban and rural 127 population altered, with socio-economic and political consequences of no little importance.

p At the end of the 70s more than 40 per cent of the capitalist world’s total population was already living in towns, while less than a third had done so in the early 50s. In the industrial countries this proportion rose to 75 per cent, and in the developing countries to a third, with fewer and fewer of the rural inhabitants available for work being directly involved in agrarian production. At the same time an increasingly large amount of manpower is becoming concentrated in the towns, a trend that has become stable not only in industrially developed capitalist countries but also in the overwhelming majority of developing countries.  [127•1 

p There are, of course, considerable regional differences in this respect in both groups, largely associated with features of their preceding historical development (see Table 10). In the industrial centres the highest proportion of urban population is in North America, particularly in the United States, where more than 90 per cent of the total population was living in towns at the end of the 70s. There is an even more significant spread in the weight of the urban population in developing countries, from 15 or 20 per cent in Asia to 60 or 65 per cent in Latin America.

p One of the most characteristic trends in recent urbanisation is the rapid increase in the role of former colonial regions in the total urban population of the capitalist world in both absolute terms and relatively. At the beginning of the period reviewed the bulk of the urban population lived in industrial countries, while at the end already more than half of the townsmen lived in the agrarian and primary producing countries. The size of this population grew roughly twice as fast in the latter as in the former, and analysis of the long-term trend allows us to suggest that more than half of the population of the contemporary capitalist world
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128 Table 10 Distribution of Urban and Rural Population in the Capitalist World Groups of countries Weight of group Proportion of urban population § in urban population in rural population 1950 1965 1980* 1985** 1950 1965 1980* 1985** 1950 1965 1980* 1985** Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 32 37 43 44 Capitalist countries 60.5 53.5 44 41.5 22.5 17.5 12 11 56 64.5 73.5 75 Western Europe 31.5 26 19.5 18.5 11 8 5.5 5 57.5 66 73 74 North America 20.5 19 16 15 5.5 4.5 3.5 3 63.5 72 79 80.5 Others 8.5 8.5 8.5 8 6 5 3.5 3 39.5 50.5 60 69 Developing countries 39.5 46.5 56 58.5 77.5 82.5 88 89 19 25 32.5 34 Asia 22.5 25 28.5 30 53 57.5 62.5 64 11 13.5 25.5 27 Africa 4.5 6 9 9.5 16 17 18 18 12.5 17.5 26.5 28.5 Latin America 12.5 15.5 18.5 19 8.5 8 7 .5 7 40.5 52.5 65.5 67 * Approximately ** Forecast § In the total population of the respective groups of countries Sources: UN Statistical Yearbook 19T2’, UN Demographic Yearbook 1980 (United Nations, New York, 1981); UN Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, 1982. 129
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will be townsmen by llie end of the century. At least twothirds of them will be living in the former colonies and semi-colonies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

p A not unimportant feature of the long-term shifts in the distribution of population is its growing concentration in very big cities. The number of cities with more than a million inhabitants increased in the 50s and 60s alone by more than 50 per cent, while the number of their inhabitants more than doubled. Big cities have been growing much faster, moreover, in developing countries. Most of the biggest cities of the contemporary capitalist, world are now already located in developing countries. The chaos of capitalist urbanisation is leading to the formation of broad urbanised zones with multimillion populations in both groups of countries, which are drawing an ever bigger part of the population of adjoining towns and rural areas into their orbit, thereby intensifying the unevenness inherent in capitalism and anarchy in the distribution of society’s main productive force.  [129•1 

p Substantial shifts are also taking place in the geographical distribution of the rural population of the non-socialist world, which has grown in recent decades exclusively in the agrarian and primary commodity producing countries. In the industrially developed countries there has been an absolute fall in its numbers, while it has increased by more than two-thirds in the developing countries as a whole, and exceeded 1,600 million at the end of the 70s.

p In the principal economic centres the complete ousting of the petty producer from agriculture was completed, or almost so, in the postwar decades. Engels pointed out the objective inevitability of this in his time, remarking that

the development of the capitalist form of production has cut the lifestrings of small production in agriculture; small production is irretrievably going to rack and ruin  [129•2 .

130 In the majority of emancipated countries that have taken the road of capitalist agrarian relations, this process is developing with increasing force, but attempts to force its pace are still complicated by the low level of development of the other spheres of their economies, above all of industry.

p The proportion of the industrial countries in the total rural population consequently fell by half in the 50s through 70s, while it rose from less than 75 per cent in the developing countries to 90 per cent. As a result there was a considerable extension of agrarian overpopulation in the latter. This enormous overpopulation, which was long a heavy burden on their economies, still remains one of the most disastrous social ’side-effects’ accompanying their economic growth under capitalism.  [130•1 

p An increasing amount of world capitalism’s rural population is thus concentrated in developing countries, above all in Asia and Africa, where the rapidly growing towns are unable to absorb the villages’ immense surplus of manpower. At the beginning of the 80s around two-thirds of this rural population lived in Asia and more than 20 per cent in Africa. The only major region where its proportion has begun to fall is Latin America, and there too, in fact, it still maintains its tendency to grow in absolute terms (increasing by more than 40 per cent in the period under review). In the coming decades the marked imbalance will apparently not be smoothed out, but will become rather more acute. In fact, all in any way valid long-term 131 demographic forecasts envisage a progressive reduction of the rural population in capitalist countries and an inevitable growth of it in developing ones by at least a third by the end of the century.

p is there, however, any real possibility that the agriculture of developing countries will be able to support the burden of new hundreds of millions of surplus agrarian population in the coming period, and provide the extra labour force with productive employment, albeit minimal, without radical socio-economic reforms in the structure of social production? There is no doubt about the extremely pressing nature of this issue, in the present situation, which goes far beyond the limits of demographic forecasts. For the ever-increasing underemployment of the manpower of the periphery of world capitalism is now becoming a burning question of universal human importance calling for close attention.  [131•1  According to the International Labour Organisation, 40 per cent of the labour force of developing countries either had no work at all in the mid-70s or were underemployed, and received less than the most minimal wage for their work. More than three-quarters of them, i.e. almost 230 million, lived in rural areas.  [131•2 

p The absence of sufficiently reliable estimates of the agrarian overpopulation in developing countries is a factor making it extremely difficult to determine exactly the scale and dynamics of employment in the whole world capitalist economy. The inadequacy, in turn, of the data on full or partial unemployment in industry and other spheres of production in most developing countries, and in some capitalist ones, is also an obstacle; so, too, are the constant upswings and recessions in employment through the effect of marked cyclic and non-cyclic fluctuations of the capitalist economy.

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p Still, however, there arc composite indicators in the international statistics that enahle us to estimate, with the necessary degree of comparability, the growth trends in the long term of that part oi’ the population that could be involved in the reproduction process. This type of indicator primarily includes estimates of the scale of growth of the gainfully employed population, analysis of which helps us arrive at the characteristics of the development trends of productivity for the different groups of countries.

p The imbalance in the postwar growth of the able-bodied population between the two groups of the capitalist economy has increased immensely. Over the twenty years of the (i()s and 70s, for example, their numbers increased twice as slowly in the developed capitalist countries as in the developing ones. Consequently there was a tendency for the proportion of the former in the total gainfully employed population of the capitalist world to decline.  [132•1 

p in the next 15 or 20 years the main directions of the operation of this tendency are unlikely to change.

p From the fact that the decisive mass of the population that will begin to work at that time in both groups of countries already exists, we can assume that around three- quarters of the gainfully employed population of today’s nonsocialist world will be concentrated in the now developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the mid-80s, and around i’our-iifths by the end of the century.  [132•2  But this labour force will still obviously be relatively unskilled in the main while the most skilled part will be concentrated as before in the economically developed centres.

p In that connection the problem of the migration of various categories of workers between countries with different levels of development will be aggravated. In many industrial countries there has been a fast growing shortage since the war of national personnel in the mass trades that do not call for any degree of professional skill. The shortage began 133 to be covered more and more by importing labour from economically less developed countries. In the 70s thi* shortage constituted around ten or twelve million, and may (according to some estimates) increase several times over again by the end of the century.

p As for the developing countries the inherent tasks of their socio-economic development will steadily lead, in the first place, to an increase in their need for well-trained, skilled personnel, a need that cannot be wholly met simply from local resources. The possibilities for attracting specialists from outside, however, are greatly limited by the increasing need for such personnel in the developed countries themselves, and also by the comparatively high standard of their pay there. It is not fortuitous that a mounting portion of the West’s funds for ’technical aid’ are spent on the specialists sent to developing countries, and on training students.

p At the same time, monopoly capital, utilising the laws of capitalist competition, is everywhere broadening the ‘import’ from developing countries of the most talented and capable part of their intelligentsia and skilled specialists. The ’brain drain’ from Asia, Africa, and Latin America has become a marked feature of the international migration of labour.  [133•1  The spontaneous flow of surplus labour between separate developing countries has also become unparalleled in scale in recent decades.

p All these objective ‘costs’ of the internationalisalion of social production are making world capitalism’s demographic problems extremely complicated and increasing their tension. At the present level of development of mankind’s productive forces the registering, regulation, and planning of manpower are already becoming more and more urgent on both the national and the international level, but capitalist society, rent by antagonistic contradictions, is unable in practice to face up to dealing with them. They can only be coped with by a more rationally structured progressive social system, a thought, that Engels expressed as follows:

p If it should become necessary for communist society to regulate the production of men, just as it will have already regulated the 134 production of things, then it, and it alone, will bo able to do this without difficulties.  [134•1 

p In most areas of the capitalist world there has been a tendency since the war toward a certain reduction of the proportion of the gainfully employed population in the total population. The operation of this trend is linked in the main with the considerable changes in the age structure of the population, especially in the developing countries, where there has been a marked extension of the age brackets of people who have not yet reached maturity. In many capitalist countries, above in Western Europe, another factor underlies the lowering of the proportion of the ablebodied, namely the rise in the expectation of life and increase in the age bracket of elderly people of pensionable age.  [134•2  Analysis of the age factors leads to the conclusion that an increasing part of the most active age brackets will probably be concentrated in coming years in the developing countries, from which there follow very complex demographic, and consequently socio-economic, consequences for further shifts in the distribution of the main productive force within the world capitalist economy.

p The indices of the dynamics and scale of the distribution of manpower in the two groups of countries will become even more significant when they are compiled from the data cited above on growth of the aggregate product. This comparison makes it possible to bring out the long-term trends in growth of the social productivity of labour calculated on the labour force potentially existing in the non-socialist world, i.e. on the size of the gainfully employed population. This productivity can be expressed most generally as the difference between the mean annual growth rates of the GDP in every macro-economic system (or its sub-systems) and the corresponding indicators of the growth of manpower.

An attempt to determine these trends from UN 135 international statistics is made in Table 11. Because of their generalised character the results arrived at are very approximate and require further elaboration and concretisation both for the groups of countries and their leading industries and for the various periods. It follows from them that, with all sorts of fluctuations of production and employment in the two groups of countries, the mean annual growth rate of potential productivity of social labour, calculated from the dynamics of the gainfully employed population over the whole period considered was around 3.1 per cent in the centres of capitalism and 3.2 per cent in the developing countries. This relation was extremely unstable, however, and was by no means typical for all the postwar decades.

Table 11 Mean Annual Growth Rates of Labour Productivity for Capitalist and Developing Countries (in percentages) Period Capitalist countries Developing countries 1950-1960 3.0 3.0 1960-1970 3.7 3.8 1970-1980 2.2 3.3 Sources: ILO. Labour Force Projections, 1965-1985’, UN Yearbook uf National Accounts Statistics, 1969’, UN Statistical Yearbook and Monthly Bulletin of Statistics for the appropriate years.

p In the first years after the war the considerably accelerated economic development in the main agrarian economic regions, and the comparatively low rates of manpower growth preserved in them from the colonial epoch, led to a tendency toward accelerated growth of their extremely low productivity of social labour, reaching the average indices of the main centres of capitalism in the 50s. In the 60s, however, there was again a revival of capitalism’s inherent line toward widening of the gap in this respect belwcen its centres and periphery, which was furthered by the industrial countries’ active taking up in those years of the advances of the scientific and technical revolution, though within the system as a whole insuperable inner contradictions fraught with new economic upheavals continued to accumulate.

136

p The extremely acute crisis processes that developed in the rnid-70s in the world capitalist economy were marked by an unprecedented weakening of the economic effectiveness of exploiting the advances of this revolution in practice in all Ihe industrially developed countries. The substantial slowing of growth and later the absolute fall in production of their aggregate GDP could not help being reflected as well in the productivity of social labour. Calculated per head of the gainfully employed population in the 70s it proved to be much below the level of the 60s, which led to a marked lowering of the dynamics of its growth shown in Table 11 for the capitalist countries. At the same time productivity rose in the developing countries al faster rates, with the result that in the 70s there was a certain narrowing of the gap in these indicators between capitalist and developing countries.  [136•1 

p The major postwar economic crisis of the mid-70s laid bare the growing instability of the world capitalist system and the extremely contradictory character of the effect of modern scientific and technical progress on it as regards growth of society’s productive forces. It would hardly be proper, however, to say that the objective patterns leading to the creation of such a vast imbalance in the levels of the social productivity of labour between the two groups of countries at the different poles of this system will begin to lose their former significance in coming years. In all probability this imbalance and steep fluctuations of its dynamics will remain essential features of the world capitalist economy’s further development.

The processes mentioned indicate simply certain very general resultant trends in the postwar shifts in the economies of capitalist and developing countries. Within each of these groups there is in turn a very wide range in the levels, dynamics, and conditions of the growth of social productivity. Above all we must draw attention to the considerable strengthening of unevenness in the distribution of the productive forces in the developed capitalist countries in recent decades.