Abstract
Abstract. Gross domestic product (GDP) represents a widely used metric to compare economic development across time and space. GDP estimates have been routinely assembled only since the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, making comparisons with prior periods cumbersome or even impossible. In recent years various efforts have been put forward to re-estimate national GDP for specific years in the past centuries and even millennia, providing new insights into past economic development on a snapshot basis. In order to make this wealth of data utilizable across research disciplines, we here present a first continuous and consistent data set of GDP time series for 195 countries from 1850 to 2009, based mainly on data from the Maddison Project and other population and GDP sources. The GDP data are consistent with Penn World Tables v8.1 and future GDP projections from the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), and are freely available at http://doi.org/10.5880/pik.2018.010 (Geiger and Frieler, 2018). To ease usability, we additionally provide GDP per capita data and further supplementary and data description files in the online archive. We utilize various methods to handle missing data and discuss the advantages and limitations of our methodology. Despite known shortcomings this data set provides valuable input, e.g., for climate impact research, in order to consistently analyze economic impacts from pre-industrial times to the future.
Highlights
The concept of measuring and comparing economic activity within and across countries using the gross domestic product (GDP) is rather new in historic terms
In order to make this wealth of data utilizable across research disciplines, we here present a first continuous and consistent data set of Gross domestic product (GDP) time series for 195 countries from 1850 to 2009, based mainly on data from the Maddison Project and other population and GDP sources
In the following we present our methodology that is used to create a continuous and consistent GDP time series for 195 countries based on national accounts data from the Penn World Table (PWT), the Maddison Project Database (MPD), World Development Indicators (WDI), the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), and projections from the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs)
Summary
The concept of measuring and comparing economic activity within and across countries using the gross domestic product (GDP) is rather new in historic terms. A reduction in vulnerability (or an increase in resilience) to natural disasters has been shown to correlate well with a nation’s GDP (Kousky, 2013), resulting in less mortality and in fewer damages relative to GDP Most research in this field focuses only on the last decades where sufficient coverage of economic activity exists for most countries of the world. There have been attempts to provide GDP or income (i.e., GDP per capita) estimates reaching further back in time based on proxies for specific periods; see, e.g., Baier et al (2002), Mitchel (2003), Maddison (2007), and Bolt and van Zanden (2014) These estimates only provide snapshots of economic activities for specific periods without continuous global coverage across time. Despite various known shortcomings that are discussed in detail below, this new data set has broadened and will further broaden the applicability of historic estimates of economic activity and potentially feed back to foster increased research interest in the field of economic history and the improvement of the current data set
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