A common characteristic of studies of development
emanating from advanced capitalist countries is
the use of descriptive rather than structural categorisations. A celebrated example from the discipline of economics
is Rostow's schema whereby individual countries
are placed in one of five supposedly sequential
"stages of economic growth" depending on the presence
or absence of certain characteristics. According
to this formulation, there is no basic distinction between
"developed" and "underdeveloped" countries.
Instead, there exists a "continuum" of development
;anging from "least" to "most" developed
