Angus Maddison

• 1. Introduction

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  Angus Maddison, a British economist born on the 6th of December 1926, spent his working life putting numbers on the long history of economic growth. His field was quantitative macroeconomic history, which measures how economies grow and develop. He documented how countries performed over very long stretches of time, and he did it for major countries on every continent. He died on the 24th of April 2010. Two questions run through his story. How can anyone estimate the wealth of a nation in an age before modern statistics? And why did some societies grow rich while others stayed poor?

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• 2. A Winding Education

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  Newcastle-on-Tyne in England is where Maddison was born. He was educated at Darlington Grammar School, then went to Selwyn College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate. Graduate study took him to McGill University and Johns Hopkins University. There he decided not to pursue a PhD. Instead he returned to the United Kingdom and taught for a year at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His doctorate did arrive eventually, from the University of Aix-Marseille in France in 1978. It came late, because a job in European economic policy had already claimed him.

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• 3. From OEEC To OECD

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  In 1953, Maddison joined the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, known as the OEEC. He rose to become Head of its Economics Division. In 1963 the OEEC became the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD. At that point Maddison became Assistant Director of the Economic Development Department. Then came a change of pace. In 1966-71 he took a leave of absence and spent the next 15 years in a series of consulting appointments. During that stretch he returned to the OECD for four years. Some of those consulting posts put him in direct contact with governments.

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• 4. Advising Governments

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  The Development Advisory Service of the Centre for International Affairs employed Maddison in 1969-71. He also worked as a policy advisor for various institutions, including the governments of Ghana and Pakistan. His travels reached many other countries. In Brazil, Guinea, Mongolia, the USSR and Japan, he often advised national leaders directly. These trips gave him insight into the factors that determine economic growth and prosperity. Those firsthand observations pointed him toward a pioneering research method.

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• 5. Rebuilding National Accounts

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  The year 1 is how far back Maddison pushed his reconstructions of national accounts, the records of what a country produces. He was a pioneer in calculating these accounts backward across periods of several decades. To do it, he paired modern research techniques with his own wide knowledge of economic history, especially how countries performed in GDP per capita. The results gave scholars a new understanding of why some countries became rich while others stayed poor or sank into poverty. In this field, he was regarded as the world's most prominent scholar. His GDP reconstructions have also drawn criticism. In the last two decades of his life, he pushed that method still further into the past.

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• 6. Deep Time Estimates

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  An authoritative study of economic growth in China over twenty centuries became one of Maddison's best-known later projects. It strongly boosted the historical debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Europe and China as two of the world's leading economic forces. His estimates of per capita income in the Roman Empire followed up pioneering work by Keith Hopkins and Raymond W. Goldsmith. Maddison also wrote many works of historical economic analysis. One is The World Economy: Historical Statistics, and he added several other reference books on the same topic. The numbers behind those books also found a permanent home in a university research group.

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• 7. Groningen And Legacy

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  In 1978, the University of Groningen appointed Maddison as Historical Professor in its Faculty of Economics. He had lectured at several universities by then, Harvard among them. He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus Professor. Until the end of his life he lived in Chevincourt, near Thourotte in France, yet he kept strong connections with Groningen. As he turned 80, he received a royal decoration as Commander in the Netherlands Order of Orange Nassau. In October 2007, Hitotsubashi University in Japan gave him an honorary doctorate. He died at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Afterward, his exhaustive work quantifying global economic history was praised as pioneering and important. At Groningen he was joint founder and intellectual leader of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, a research group in the Faculty of Economics focused on long-term economic growth. The databases kept by Maddison and his former colleagues now include virtually every country in the world. Researchers who open them today are still working with the numbers he and his colleagues assembled.

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