This is a suitable occasion for surveying the progress achieved, in the past 60 years, in quantifying world economic development, and analysing the causal influences which determine the pace and pattern of growth. This was a major objective of the founding fathers of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW). The initiative for creating an association including both academics and official statisticians came from Simon Kuznets (1901-85), the pioneer of quantitative economic history. Milton Gilbert (1909-79) and Richard Stone (1913-1991) were strategic partners with enormous international leverage in creating and diffusing standard procedures for construction of comparable national accounts by official statistical offices.
This paper analyses the development of macro-measurement in three epochs:
a) for the IARIW epoch, back to 1950, the main purpose has been to illuminate policy options to improve growth performance at the national level and to analyse inter-country divergence in real income levels to help devise policies for catch-up. We now have official estimates of growth and levels for the vast bulk of the world economy from 1950 onwards.
b) For the Kuznetsian epoch of “modern economic growth” back to 1820, quantitative
economic historians have made great progress in measuring world economic growth and in quantifying the forces determining performance. There is scope for further research to fill gaps and crosscheck existing estimates, but the broad contours of development in this period are not under serious challenge.
c) for the “merchant capitalist” epoch, 1500-1820, there are sharply divergent interpretations about world, and particularly European performance. The dichotomy between positive and negative assessments started with Adam Smith and Malthus at the end of the 18th century. In my view, the evidence for the Malthusian view is shoddy.
Historians usually start at the beginning of their chronology. Quantitative economic historians have to work backwards from the present, proceeding from what is known and accepted, to earlier epochs where evidence is weaker and there is greater reliance on clues and conjecture.
*This is the first Ruggles Lecture, delivered at the 28th IARIW General Conference, Cork, Ireland August 2004
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