Catching up development
By catching-up development one understands a catching-up process of a developing country compared to the industrialized countries , which is characterized by the fact that social, demographic, political or infrastructural processes, which in today's industrialized countries have extended over a long historical period, take place in a relatively short time.
It is based on the modernization theory concept of being able to transfer the western development path directly to the developing countries. Due to the lack of success in development aid and persistent global poverty, opposing positions arose in development research in the 1970s, which can be summarized as dependency theory.
The dependency theory assumes that a catch-up development is structurally impossible because hierarchical dependencies (dependencies) limit the development potential of the latter between industrialized and developing countries. Successful examples of catching up development like Singapore contradict this view.