除了他之前在《经济成长的阶段——非共产党宣言》(The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto)中提出的五个阶段之外,罗斯托还讨论了高额大众消费之后的第六阶段,并在1971年将其称为“追求质量阶段”。[2]以下为罗斯托模型中的六个成长阶段及其特征:
^Rostow, W. W. (1960). "The Five Stages of Growth-A Summary". The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 4–16. Archived from the original on 2013-02-23.
^Rostow, W. W. (1971). Politics and the Stages of Growth. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521081979.
^Rostow, W. W. (1962). The Stages of Economic Growth. London: Cambridge University Press. pp. 2, 38, 59.
^Mishra, Puri (2010). Economics of Development and Planning—Theory and Practice. Himalaya Publishing House. pp. 127–136. ISBN978-81-8488-829-4.
^Rostow emphasizes in Stages that "the stages of growth are an arbitrary and limited way of looking at the sequence of modern history: ... to dramatize not merely the uniformities in the sequence of modernization but also—and equally—the uniqueness of each nation's experience."
Meier, Gerald M. Sequence of Stages. Leading Issues in Economic Development Fifth. New York: Oxford University Press. 1989: 69–72 [2019-12-31]. ISBN 978-0-19-505572-6. (原始内容存档于2016-11-14).