TheMaddisonProject: collaborative research on historical national accounts

Abstract

The Maddison Project, initiated in March 2010 by a group of close colleagues of Angus Maddison, aims to develop an effective system of cooperation between scholars to continue Maddison's work on measuring economic performance in the world economy. This article is a first product of the project. Its goal is to explain the aims and approach of the project, and, as a first result of this ‘collaboratory’, to inventory recent research on historical national accounts. We also briefly discuss some of the problems related to these historical statistics and we extend and where necessary revise the estimates published by Maddison in his latest overviews. Most new work relates to the period before 1820; it leads to a reassessment of levels of GDP per capita in western Europe in the early modern period, and to a confirmation of Maddison's previous estimates of Asian levels of real income.

Party Strength and Economic Growth

“…We conduct numerous tests on the relationship between Party Strength and GDP per capita growth (obtained from Bolt & van Zanden 2014), employing different estimation techniques, specifications, samples, time lag specifications, and operationalizations of key concepts. It is worth signaling at the outset that the main result -Party Strength enhances economic growth -is robust to an extent that has few parallels in the literature on institutional determinants of growth.…”

Historical energy transitions: Speed, prices and system transformation

“…In 2014, six of the top ten largest companies in the world (as measured by sales revenue) were oil companies and two of the other four in the top ten were car companies, also part of the fossil fuel-based energy system (Forbes 2015) their revenues amount to 4% of global GDP. As a comparison, in 1900, when coal was king, global revenue from coal was roughly 2% of global GDP (Mitchell 2010, Bolt andvan Zanden 2014), though this level of financial power did not halt the transition towards oil. In other words, as Barbier (2013) stresses, there is considerable financial and political power to delay a transition to low carbon energy sources and technologies.…”

Natural Resources Curse in the Long Run? Bolivia, Chile and Peru in the Nordic Countries’ Mirror

“…It should be noticed that these differences are not evident when the previous Maddison Project is used [31]. Given that our concern is related more to trends than levels and that trend differences do not appear between both databases, we preferred to use the last database due to its methodological improvements.…”

“…Sources: Bolivia, [30]. The rest of the countries from [31]. Few previous works have compared long-term development trajectories of Latin American and Nordic countries [23,32,33].…”