Concerns about rapid growth of urban areas combined with small or moderate increases in industrialization have given rise to analyses which compare levels of urbanization and indexes of industrialization either cross-nationally or for nineteenth-century conditions in the now developed countries as contrasted with twentieth-century conditions in the less-developed countries.'The average relationship found (either on the cross-national or longitudinal basis) is used to define an expected" normal" relationship between urbanization and industrialization levels. Countries which have levels of urbanization that are much higher relative to their levels of industrialization than those obtained for the" normal" relationship are then defined as being overurbanized for their level of industrial development.

But there has been a prolific debate about the usefulness and validity of the overurbanization thesis. A major criticism of the thesis is the use of a measure of central tendency for defining the norm against which individual countries are compared. 2 This measure of central tendency provides no theoretical justification either for the assumption that those countries which lie along this line are experiencing" balanced" development in the spheres of urbanization and industrialization, or for