Maddison - Contours of the world economy, 1-2030 AD: essays in macro-economic history

Contours of the World Economy, 12030AD

Essays in Macro-Economic History

Angus Maddison

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Angus Maddison, 2007

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I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts by Fatih Birol, Derek Blades, Alan Bowman, Henk-Jan Brinkman, Roger Brown, Ian Castles, John Coatsworth, Max Corden, Robert Cribb, Franois Crouzet, Pierre van der Eng, Stanley Engerman, Paul Frijters, Andre Hofman, Catrinus Jepma, Wim Jongman, Andrew Kamarck, Carol Kidwell, Tao Kong, Paul Lamartine Yates, David Landes, Debin Ma, Charles Maddison, John R. McNeill, Stanislav Menshikov, Jim Oeppen, Peter Oppenheimer, Guy Pfefferman, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Prasada Rao, Dominic Rathbone, Osamu Saito, Simon Scott, Graeme Snooks, Kaoru Sugihara, Eddy Szirmai, Bart van Ark, and Harry X. Wu.

Elizabeth Maddison, Tom Kuipers, and Gerard Ypma gave me invaluable advice on the art of computing and Dirk Stelder was kind enough to construct the map of the Roman Empire for the frontispiece and .

I am particularly indebted to my friend Colin McEvedy (19302005), who shared my enthusiasm for quantitative exploration of the past, gave me invaluable guidance on historical demography, precious insights into the ancient world, and incisive answers to a welter of questions.

I benefited from discussions at meetings in which I presented parts of the analysis: the Kuznets Memorial lecture at Yale University in 1998, the Wendt lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, the Abramovitz lecture at Stanford University in 2001, a Harvard University Workshop organized by the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies in 2002, the Colin Clark lecture at the University of Queensland in 2003, the Ruggles lecture at the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth in Cork, the Figuerola Lecture at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2004, the Arndt lecture at the Australian National University in 2005, and seminars in Groningen and Queensland in 2006 on World Economic Performance, Past, Present, and Future, to mark my 80th birthday.

An earlier version of in the Review of Income and Wealth in March 2005.

The purpose of this book is to identify the forces which explain how and why some parts of the world have grown rich and others have lagged behind.

It is a companion study to earlier books of mine. Monitoring the World Economy, 18201992 (1995) dealt with performance in the capitalist epoch, for which the evidence is incomparably richer than it was 60 years ago. There is still a need to fill gaps and crosscheck existing estimates, but the broad contours of development in this period are not under serious challenge. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (2001) and The World Economy: Historical Statistics (2003) had a much longer temporal perspective, back to the first century AD. Here growth was much slower, inter-country differences in income smaller, quantitative evidence weaker and harder to find, with greater reliance on clues and conjecture. There is also considerable disagreement amongst economic historians about the contours of development in these earlier centuries. However, recent research has made considerable advances in measuring economic progress and demographic change in western Europe and the major Asian countries back to 1500, and there is enough evidence to make tentative estimates for the Roman empire in the first century AD.

Scrutiny of distant horizons is a meaningful, useful, and necessary exercise because differences in the pace and pattern of change in major parts of the world economy have deep roots in the past. It is also useful to look into the future to see how the relative importance of the western and Asian economies is likely to change. I have therefore made projections for the world economy and its major components to 2030.

Quantification clarifies issues which qualitative analysis leaves fuzzy. It is more readily contestable and likely to be contested. It sharpens scholarly discussion, sparks off rival hypotheses, and contributes to the dynamics of the research process. It can only do this if the sources of the quantitative evidence and the nature of the conjectures and proxy procedures are described transparently so that a dissenting reader can augment or reject parts of the evidence, or introduce alternative hypotheses. Macro-economic quantification is not new. It started in the seventeenth century, as demonstrated in . It fell out of fashion until the 1950s when it became a major tool for policy analysis. I have tried here to promote its resurrection as a tool for historical analysis.

Although quantification is important, no sensible person would claim that it can tell the whole story. One needs to probe beyond quantifiable causes to deeper layers of explanation. This is a complex task because there are many interactive forces whose individual impact is difficult to specify. Countries have widely different institutions, traditions, and policies, which have a powerful impact on the operation of atomistic market forces. Hence the need to use a blend of evidence on proximate and deeper layers of causality.

There are three parts to the book. The first contains an analysis of the long-term performance of different parts of the world economy. The second analyses the development of techniques of macro-economic measurement since the seventeenth century. The third contains projections of world economic growth to 2030, and examines the possible impact of global warming.