Social and economic backwardness of developing countries is one of the global problems and needs to be overcome. The main way of its overcoming is industrialization of economy of these countries.
The article considers both broad and narrow understanding of industrialization in developing countries and outlines the reasons which are constraining the active distribution of industrialization in developing countries.
The author analyses the role and economic interest of developed countries in this process, identifies the essence of the cascade mechanism of industrialization in developing countries and its social and economic consequences both for developing countries and global economy.
The reasons for acceleration of the cascade mechanism of industrialization in developing countries are under consideration. Two models of industrialization in developing countries which prevail in the world practice – import-substituting and export-oriented have been characterized according to their essence, advantages and disadvantages, productivity as well as emergence of newly industrialized countries (NIC) of different "waves" of industrialization.
The author describes the progress of social and economic development of the newly industrialized countries (NIC), especially of "the first wave" of industrialization as based on the analysis of a complete group of statistics: a) the indicators which cardinally changed the demographic situation in these countries, i.e. coefficients of birth rate, mortality, a natural increase of population, infantile mortality, total birth rate, indicators of the age structure of the population, life expectancy and urbanization; b) the indicators reflecting the level of economic development, income level per capita, the index of human development, the education level; c) the indicators characterizing formation of innovative economy, the volume of internal costs of research and development, expenses on research and development in structure of gross domestic product (GDP), number of people occupied in research and development; the innovative index, number of patent applications, indexes of development of the information and communication technologies (ICT) and network readiness.
The article considers ten newly industrialized countries which are included in top list because of the development of knowledge-intensive industries, high-tech industries and types of productions, aeronautical and aerospace industry, precision instruments, production of computers, semiconductors, communication equipment, pharmaceutical industry. The development of scientific and technical potential of the newly industrialized countries has led to appearance of such forms of the territorial organization as scientific and industrial parks, science and technology parks, technopolises, some of them have been described in the article.