The search for prosperity that would enable particularly the poor individuals in the poorest countries to improve their living conditions has long been at the core of development economics. In that sense, a first contribution of this thesis to our understanding of the development process is the study of the transmission of aggregate economic growth across individuals, which enables us to provide a simplified framework to the characterization of `pro-poor' economic policies. Furthermore, this work also aims to better understand the industrialization strategies that may help poor countries increase the sophistication of their production, thereby helping them move up along the development ladder. The proxy proposed here measures abnormal deviations in the productivity of intermediate goods and shows that the presence of low productivity in intermediates significantly lowers the annual growth rate of countries and therefore, it has an impact on their economic development.