From Clio Infrastructure
National Accounts (GDP per capita): the national accounts hub of the GGDC
Economists often use estimates of GDP per capita as their standard measure of economic performance, and GDP itself as a measure of ‘economic growth’. Thanks to the work by Kuznets, Maddison and many others, there is consensus about the concept that is measured, and various international statistical agencies collect this kind of information for different parts of the world, and for the world as a whole.
Moreover, a well functioning network of economic historians – set up already in the 1950s by Kuznets – has carried out a programme of reconstructing the historical national accounts of different countries, often going back to the early 19th century.
This work was synthesized by Angus Maddison, who constructed sets of estimates covering the world economy as a whole, going back to the year 0 (Maddison 2001, 2003, and his website at http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/).
The hub on National Accounts was set up by the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, which is a recognized international centre for the study of (historical) national accounts and for disseminating large datasets on the web. Recently, it has carried out two large projects, the EU-Klems database (covering the EU and the period from the 1970s to the present) and NWO-middelgroot ‘An International Database on Economic Growth and Development’, which focused on the putting together of long time series of national accounts of parts of the economy (industry, services, agriculture; investment, consumption etc.).
Already, work is in pogress to create a dataset covering the national accounts of Java between 1815 and 1939, and Indonesia between 1880-2000 and this dataset promises to offer opportunities for a detailed analysis of the causes behind the relatively slow growth of income per capita in this former Dutch colony. Van Zanden is also part of a research project coordinated by Steve Broadberry (Warwick University) and sponsored by the Leverhulme Foundation, aimed at reconstructing the English national accounts from the 1250s onwards and of the national accounts of Holland from the 1510s onwards (linking in to the national accounts of the Netherlands in 1807); this project will be finished in 2011, and the results – annual time series of national accounts stretching hundreds of years – will also be made available through the hub.
Visit the website of this hub.
Participant(s) involved
Groningen Growth and Development Centre
Faculty of Economics
University of Groningen
P.O. Box 800
9700 AV Groningen
The Netherlands
+31 50 363 3675
ggdc@eco.rug.nl
http://www.ggdc.nl/
