Each modernization has its own specifics, but the industries that moved the process forward had a number of similar features in different countries. Their study allows us to establish how successful this or that attempt at modernization will be, already at the stage of declaring its strategy.

Let's start with the obvious: the engines of modernization are the branches of mass industrial production, developing at the expense of the agricultural (from which they draw the labor force) or resource (from which the necessary investments come) sectors. In the first case, examples are the states of Western Europe and the USA in the 19th century, South Korea, Malaysia and China in the 20th. In the second case, the successful countries of the Persian Gulf – the UAE and Qatar – come to mind. Soviet Russia of the 1930s is the only country in which agriculture was a supplier of both workers and investments; as a result, they got a not very viable economy with a distorted production structure. At the same time, the agricultural and extractive industries themselves cannot serve as agents of modernization: all the main producers of minerals are backward states with minimally developed industries. Thus, the idea of modernization is incompatible with the ideology of an energy (bauxite, diamond, copper, banana, coffee) superpower.

To be more specific, several features of the basic industries for modernization should be highlighted. First, they should be oriented toward mass production. Second, if possible, they should not be critically dependent on raw material supplies, i.e. they should have a very high share of added value. Third, they should use new technologies and maintain demand for them. Fourth, they should be labor-intensive and, as a result, form broad groups of workers interested in their development. And finally, fifth, they should focus primarily on the global market and only then on the domestic market.

It is no coincidence that in Asian countries the drivers of modernization have been shipbuilding and automobile manufacturing, somewhat later the production of audio and video equipment, and in recent years the computer and information industries. All these industries required the adoption and assimilation of technological achievements from the West (in the 1960s and 1970s, technology imports in Japan exceeded their exports eight times). They made it possible to quickly reach mass production (by 2000, South Korea produced merchant ships with a total tonnage of 12.2 million tons, or 54% of the world's total); in the late 1990s, Malaysia produced 34% of the world's mobile phones; in the mid-2000s, China provided 39% of the world's computer output, 42% of televisions, and more than 50% of office equipment. They never focused on the domestic market – for the simple reason that the main guarantee of success was economies of scale (in the same South Korea, a plant designed to produce 300,000 cars per year was put into operation in 1967 – although at that time the country had 165,000 passenger cars). In the industries that became the engines of growth, raw materials and energy made up from 10-12 (as in electronics) to 22-25 (as in shipbuilding) percent of the cost of finished products. And finally, the formation of new industries ensured the formation of a mass working class, whose main interest was associated with the continuation and development of modernization processes (for example, in Malaysia in the late 1990s, more than 14% of the workforce was employed in the electronics industry, in the automotive industry and shipbuilding in South Korea – about 11%, in the production of office equipment in China in the mid-2000s – about 10%). In just 25–30 years, the “locomotives of modernization” in Asian countries have become a reality of the global economy and the basis of their national economies.

At the same time, the modernization breakthrough of recent decades in Asia and Latin America has not turned these regions into technology exporters. And it is clear why: as technologies spread, they turned out to be too cheap to invent themselves, and the volume of their potential export remained incomparable with the export of industrial goods. Even highly complex and capital-intensive industries – from microchip production to pharmaceuticals – have not become drivers of modernization in developing countries.

Surprisingly, everything is arranged the other way around in Russia today. Oil and gas production, as well as metallurgy (which employ 2.6% of the workforce), are considered national champions; the automobile industry serves only the domestic market; the shipbuilding industry has quietly died; the production of office equipment, computers and mobile phones is simply non-existent. But talk about nanotechnology and “closing” technologies is as common as talk about the lack of alternatives to modernization. Time will tell whether these talks will help progress.

Modernizatsya.ru: Growth Engines