The Engineering Sector in a Model of Economic Development

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses some issues related to the role of the engineering sector in transmitting growth from an expanding primary goods export sector to the rest of the economy in a model of economic development. It summarizes the objectives and structure of the model and presents some of the conclusions. The first objective of the model is to formalize some of the roles that economic historians and development economists have assigned to the metal working/machine-building sectors. It has been suggested that in this sector, the skills acquired while performing certain activities or tasks can then be fruitfully applied to other activities or tasks. A second objective of the model is to incorporate such a sector into a multisector model of the economy where some initial stimulus sets the growth process going in one sector and where a series of factors and parameters will determine whether the growth is transmitted to other sectors.