• more (or less) resource mobilization,

• more effective allocation of those resources across sectors of the economy and among economic actors, and/or

• more efficient utilization of resources by the various economic actors.

A vision helps establish goals that in turn animate an economic strategy. A vision of achieving economic and/or political equality with other nations is fundamentally different from one of achieving maximum consumer purchasing power today, let alone increased equality or increased security of incomes. The former is likely to justify "exceptional" levels of resource mobilization and personal responsibility, whereas the latter typically would not. Government intervention to promote increased security of incomes is apt to involve transfers that promote consumption while at the same time relieving individuals of a measure of responsibility for their own welfare. Thus, economic strategies are based on differing roles and responsibilities for the economic actors as well as differing notions of resource mobilization and allocation.

Economic strategies can employ more or less direct means to influence the mobilization and disposition of resources and the incomes they generate. Within a given economic structure the efficiency of resource utilization seems best promoted indirectly, as suggested long ago by Adam Smith and others, by ensuring that markets work effectively. High levels of resource mobilization, in contrast, typically require more direct government intervention, such as "forced" saving or higher standards of admission for university entrance, a point that is central to the analysis of the producer orientation described below. High levels of resource mobilization can achieve increased growth rates, but often because seemingly high levels of labor productivity are offset by low level of return to capital. High-growth, based at least in part on high total factor productivity, seems to require shifting the structure of an economy from current advantages and opportunities toward those of the future, for nations as it does for firms. It is no accident that the high-performing Asian countries have experienced export-led growth, the exports have been led by manufactures, and, beginning with Japan, several seem to have had remarkable success in moving their manufactured exports upscale to higher-technology, higher-growth sectors.

One of the central issues in this paper is to consider how and why some countries have been more successful in shifting their economic structures toward future opportunities and why others, such as the OPEC countries with their great natural advantages, have been conspicuously unsuccessful in doing so. A related issue is the role of these opportunities in creating a rationale for enhanced resource mobilization. High levels of resource mobilization in the absence of appropriate market opportunities can lead rapidly to low rates of return, at least in terms of the domestic currency, or to capital outflows. Japan, for example, has saved and invested about as much of its GDP during this decade as it did in the 1960s, but the returns (at least in yen) have dropped from approximately 10 per-