Big Push Theory
Updated 2026-08-01
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Proposed by Paul Rosenstein-Rodan in the 1940s as a prescription for late industrialization. The claim is that a developing economy cannot escape a low-level equilibrium through piecemeal investment, because any single project faces too small a market to be profitable. If many complementary industries are built at once, however, their workers and owners become each other's customers, so the market expands enough to make every project viable. The theory emphasizes indivisibilities in production, pecuniary externalities, and the coordinating role of planning or state investment.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Program design: bundle complementary investments together instead of funding isolated projects. - Threshold check: estimate the minimum scale at which a market becomes self-sustaining on its own. - Coordination plan: identify who must move at the same time for any single move to pay off.
Anchor fast decisions
A single factory in a poor region cannot sell enough because its workers have no local market. When several complementary industries start together, each one's payroll becomes demand for the others, so profitability rises for all of them at the same time. This is a coordination problem rather than a resource problem: the investments are individually unprofitable and jointly profitable, so no private actor moves first without a mechanism that makes everyone move together.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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- baike.baidu.comhttps://baike.baidu.com/item/大推进理论verified
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