Maddison Project — LLMpedia

Maddison Project
Name	Maddison Project
Formation	2010s
Founder	Angus Maddison
Purpose	Historical national income and GDP estimates
Headquarters	Amsterdam
Fields	Economic history, Macroeconomics, Quantitative history

Contents

Maddison Project

The Maddison Project is an initiative maintaining and extending long-run national income and gross domestic product per capita estimates originally assembled by Angus Maddison and continued by a network of scholars affiliated with institutions such as the University of Groningen, the University of Oxford, and the OECD. It compiles time series spanning preindustrial periods to the contemporary era to support research by historians and economists working on topics linked to Industrial Revolution, Great Divergence, World Bank, United Nations, and comparative studies involving regions like Western Europe, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. The Project's datasets have been used in analyses related to GDP per capita, economic growth, living standards, poverty, and long-run development debates surrounding figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Simon Kuznets, and Paul Krugman.

History and Origins

The Project traces its conceptual lineage to the quantitative reconstructions of Angus Maddison, whose work interlinked archival research from national statistical offices like the UK Office for National Statistics and the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques with comparative tables used by scholars at the League of Nations and the International Monetary Fund. Its formal reconstitution emerged as a collaborative effort involving researchers from the University of Groningen, the University of California, Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago, building on earlier volumes such as Maddison's monographs and datasets referenced in studies by Maddison (1995), Maddison (2001), and commentators in journals like the Journal of Economic History, Economic History Review, and Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The Project employs historical national accounting methods, linking primary sources such as prewar national accounts from the Statistisches Bundesamt and the Instituto Nacional de Estadística with secondary syntheses from scholars at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. It uses benchmark years, purchasing power parity adjustments influenced by work at the International Comparison Program and the Penn World Table, price series from the Consumer Price Index archives and commodity price histories drawn from the World Bank Commodity Markets, while drawing institutional guidance from the United Nations Statistical Division and methodologies debated at conferences at All Souls College, Oxford and the Royal Economic Society.

Major outputs include updated datasets and methodological notes published by researchers affiliated with University of Groningen, the Paris School of Economics, and the University of Warwick, often disseminated through working papers at the CESifo Group, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. The Project's revisions have been cited alongside volumes from Cambridge University Press and articles in Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Key updates have intersected with research on the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, Meiji Restoration, and the postwar reconstruction of Japan, Germany, and Italy.

Researchers at institutions including Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University use the datasets to analyze topics such as the Great Divergence, convergence hypothesis, and standards of living in premodern societies like Imperial China, Mughal Empire, and Ottoman Empire. Policymakers at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank reference long-run series for modeling scenarios involving European Union enlargement and development strategies for regions like Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The data underlie prominent empirical studies comparing trajectories of countries such as United States, China, India, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa.

Critiques have come from scholars at the London School of Economics, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Cambridge who question interpolation techniques, benchmark choices, and the comparability of purchasing power parities across preindustrial societies. Debates in venues like the Economic History Review, Journal of Development Economics, and panels at Royal Economic Society meetings highlight uncertainties in estimating output for polities such as the Holy Roman Empire, Ming dynasty, Safavid Empire, and colonial territories administered by British Empire and Spanish Empire. Methodological limitations flagged by analysts at the National Bureau of Economic Research include assumptions about sectoral decomposition, labor productivity proxies used in studies of agrarian economies, and reliance on sparse fiscal records from regions like Latin America and Africa.

Despite limitations, the Project has significantly influenced scholarship at centers such as the Institute for Advanced Study, the European University Institute, and the Brookings Institution, informing debates on inequality in works by Thomas Piketty, growth accounting exercises by Robert Lucas, and development strategies discussed by Jeffrey Sachs and Dani Rodrik. It has shaped pedagogical materials at universities including Oxford University, University College London, and King's College London, and fed into policy modeling at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, and central banks like the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Board for long-run historical context in analyses of inflation, productivity, and structural transformation.