The long view on economic growth: New estimates of GDP

GDP estimates form the backbone of our understanding of economic change in the past and the present. This chapter presents and discusses the results of an update of the Maddison Project, which aimed to incorporate the results of the 2011 round of the International Comparison Programme (ICP), and of the efforts of many scholars who have extended and deepened the work on historical national accounts. A method is presented to test the reliability of various approaches to back-project historical time series of GDP, and it is concluded that Maddison’s 1990 benchmark still produces the most plausible results. The implications for this for the growth of the world economy since 1820 are discussed.