From Clio Infrastructure

Objectives

Global inequality: a key problem of the contemporary world

Some countries have become quite rich in the (recent) past, others have remained poor. New theoretical insights in economics – such as new institutional economics, new economic geography and new growth theory - and the rise of global economic and labour history mean that these processes can and should be studied on a world scale. These issues can only be tackled on the basis of global datasets for analyzing patterns of economic performance and their causes. These global datasets are lacking. Moreover, the data that are available are not always based on state of the art information of the countries and regions involved. This makes them at times unreliable, and even misleading. To address this situation, economic and social historians must come together, to gather and share knowledge to create reliable global datasets of the most relevant indicators of economic performance and its causes. Their knowledge needs to be pooled and sharing protocols have to be set.

CLIO-INFRA will link existing and create new datasets that together will enable new opportunities for data analysis and the testing of hypotheses from new economic theories. CLIO INFRA will greatly enhance our understanding of the origins, causes and character of the process of global inequality. It will also supply the necessary information for groups in society that are worried about current trends in (global) inequality.

A collaborative approach

To develop this cooparation, we draw on the expertise in collaboratories of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) and other organisations [VKS, DANS, UU]. To construct global datasets, teams of scholars working on different regions and/or time periods will come together to share their expertise to construct the necessary global datasets. This way of working, called a collaboratory, plays an important role in CLIO INFRA. It will ensure that the most urgently needed datasets on global inequality in the period after 1500 are produced and made accessible. CLIO-INFRA is a cooperation between four Dutch institutes/universities, with ample experience and expertise in this field, and two partners from abroad (Universities of Tübingen and of Debrecen). It brings together a number of specialized collaboratories organized by different partners on key topics:

• GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and its components: University of Groningen),
• Institutions, quality of life, geography and environment, and inequality: Utrecht University
• Global labour relations, wages and prices, and demography and gender: IISH
• Human capital formation: University of Debrecen
• Standard of living: University of Tübingen

Central portal
These pooled resources form datasets that are accessible via a central portal, hosted by IISH. The portal and archiving of the data are provided by DANS. The portal provides visualisation tools to explored the pooled data. On the basis of the software from Statplanet and Gapminder, visualisation of the data will provide means of exploration and dissemination.

DARIAH
CLIO INFRA is embedded in the European Commission initiative Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), through one of the partners, DANS, which coordinates the preparation project now under way. DARIAH is both on the ESFRI Roadmap, and on the Dutch national roadmap for large-scale research facilities (‘Nederlandse Roadmap Grootschalige Onderzoeksfaciliteiten’).