Economic Growth from Octavian to Obama
Poor countries can adopt ideas and technologies that took rich countries millennia to develop, and thereby leapfrog into abundance.
by Marian L. Tupy
September 4, 2018
Earlier this year, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre released a new edition of its Maddison Project Database, which provides information on global growth and income levels over the long run. The 2018 version of the data, first compiled by the late University of Groningen economics professor Angus Maddison, covers 169 countries up to the year 2016. Some information, dealing with parts of Europe and the Middle East, goes back to the time of Christ (or, for the secularly inclined, Rome’s first emperor, Octavian). It provides a stunning window on humanity’s struggle to generate and sustain rapid economic growth, until recent centuries ushered in the current Age of Abundance.
Angus Maddison, the British quantitative macroeconomic historian who died in 2010, spent his adult life estimating gross domestic product (GDP) figures for a growing range of countries over a lengthening period of time. In 1995, he published GDP estimates for 56 countries goi…
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