GGDC in the news

The 8th World KLEMS Conference will be held on March 27-28, 2025 in Tokyo. This is the second World KLEMS Conference in Tokyo, with the first one held in 2014. This conference is organized by Gakushuin University, Hitotsubashi University, and Research...

On May 30,  Douglas Gollin  of Tufts and Oxford University will give the 2024 Maddison Lecture. Gollin will speak on the topic of Structural Transformation and Growth. Economists have long recognised that for a country to develop, its economy should...

The Financial, Economic and Business History (FEB-HIS) Summer School for PhD students and Postdocs will take place in Groningen from Monday 24th June to Friday 28th June 2024. It is organised by the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) of the University...

Last month GGDC director Robert Inklaar, gave an interview for the Open Science blog of the University of Groningen Library. Part of open science is that researchers make their data FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. But how to do...

We are delighted to announce the upcoming GGDC conference on Tuesday, May 28, 2024, and Wednesday, May 29, 2024. The conference will take place at a convenient location in the city centre of Groningen. In the coming months, we will be sharing further...

The Productivity Institute recently published a new blog introducing the Penn World Table (PWT). Authored by Ryan Marapin, Robert Inklaar and Reitze Gouma, this blog showcases two example analyses that illustrate the potential of the PWT data set, along...

The Council of Economic Advisers, a component of the Executive Office of the President in the Biden-Harris Administration, has released the 2023 Economic Report of the President. This report starts with a reflection by President Biden about the...

Robert Inklaar, Daan Freeman and Erwin Diewert have won the 2021 Kendrick prize during the 37th IARIW General Conference held in August in Luxembourg. Their paper titled ‘Natural Resources and Missing Inputs in International Productivity Comparisons’ was...

On June 9th, The Economist featured research by John Fernald of INSEAD Business School and GGDC director Robert Inklaar. In their article 'The UK Productivity “Puzzle” in an International Comparative Perspective', they argue that most of Britain’s slowdown...

On May 26 The Economist featured an article on China's attempts to mitigate its exposure to Western influence, using data from the Penn World Table version 10.0.

The fourteenth conference of the European Historical Economics Society (EHES) will be held at the University of Groningen, Friday - Saturday, 17-18 June 2022.

On March 20th, The Economist featured research by the GGDC and UNU-WIDER on the manufacturing renaissance in Africa. A key finding is that the share of people working in manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa has risen from 7.2% of the total in 2010 to 8.4%....

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar are both in the Dutch Economists Top 40, compiled annually by the journal ESB, on places 35 and 39. On the separate list of highest scoring economists in 2019, Robert Inklaar comes in at third place. The main ranking is...

In early December, several media outlets paid attention to a report written by Bart Los and Jouke van Dijk (UG, Faculty of Spatial Sciences), about the employment impact of the large NortH2 hydrogen project for the North of the Netherlands in general and...

On September 10 and 11, you can join a workshop that is part of the STEG project and organised by Robert Inklaar and Akos Valentinyi. The workshop will focus on how improved data or economic measurement can help shed a light on the process of structural...

On September 1, Robert Inklaar has taken over as director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) from Marcel Timmer.

Together with UG-colleagues Thijs Broekhuizen, Sierdjan Koster and Arjen Edzes and several experts from non-academic circles, Bart Los wrote the first edition of De Staat van de Noord-Nederlandse Economie (The State of the Economy of the Northern...

The GGDC organizes a conference on June 15–17 2020 in Groningen, on the themes central to GGDC, namely long-run economic development, trade and technology. The conference will feature keynote speeches by Carol Graham (Brookings, Maryland), Branko Milanovic...

On February 7, the New York Times published an article on regional implications of Brexit. It featured a map on regional economic Brexit risks in Europe, taken from the Papers in Regional Science article from 2018, co-authored by GGDC-members Wen Chen and...

The Socio-Economic Council of the Northern Netherlands, SER-NN, organized a meeting on November 26 about the possible impact of Brexit on three Northern provinces of The Netherlands. Bart Los gave a talk and participated in a panel with representatives...

Today, the Financial Times reports on new research by Jonathan Eaton (U. of Pennsylvania) and Samuel Kortum (Yale) using data from the World Input Output Database. Eaton and Kortum find that trade volumes in services is heavily affected by distance. So if,...

In an article in the (Dutch) Volkskrant, Marcel Timmer is interviewed on the consequences of the trade negotiations between the NAFTA countries, the United States, Mexico and Canada. He argues that the inter-connected nature of trade and production means...

At the latest conference of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA), Bart Los, together with Phillip McCann, Raquel Ortega-Argilés and Frank van Oort, organised a session on Brexit. The presentations focused on (e.g.) the regional disparities of...

At the latest General Conference of the International Association of Research in Income and Wealth, GGDC researchers contributed substantially to the program:

Marcel Timmer is interviewed by the Dutch newspaper NRC on the effects of import tariffs on cars. These have been threatened by Trump and would aim to shift car production to the United States. Such tariffs would hurt Americans by making cars more...

Marcel Timmer, Robert Inklaar and Jop Woltjer were amongst the presenters at the Fifth World KLEMS conference, organised by Dale Jorgenson and others at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on June 4–5. Presentations included discussion of the...

On May 23, Thomas Piketty gave the Maddison lecture, on the topic of globalization and inequality. See here for some highlights and how Piketty's work relates to research of GGDC.

In the IMF's latest World Economic Outlook, its chapter 3 on manufacturing jobs relies heavily on data provided by the GGDC, including the World Input-Output Database and the GGDC Productivity Level Database, as well as relying on the data from the World...

Today, Bart Los will present new research jointly with Marcel Timmer on Measuring Bilateral Exports of Value Added at a conference organised by the NBER and CRIW on the Challenges of Globalization in the Measurement of National Accounts, which brings...

On March 6, Robert Inklaar gave his inaugural lecture to officially accept his position of Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare. In this lecture, he established how productivity growth in the 21st century has been low by historical...

On March 2, Bart Los gave a seminar at the European Commission, Directorate General of Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) on the usefulness of the World Input-Output Database for tracking European competitiveness in a world characterised by global...

A recent report on the importance of trading links with Europe for the Scottish economy emphasises the importance of taking a global value chain perspective to analysing this topic. The report relies on the WIOD database to make these arguments.

The annual top-40 of economists and business researchers in the Netherlands features both Marcel Timmer (24) and Robert Inklaar (32). This ranking, produced by the journal Economische and Statistische Berichten, is based on each researcher's 15 best...

The recent research by Wen Chen, Bart Los and others about how different regions in the UK and in Europe could be affected by Brexit has attracted substantial media attention, from The Guardian, the New Statesman, the Evening Standard, Metro, The...

How important is the trade relationship between the Netherlands and United States for American jobs? In a recent tweet, the Dutch Embassy in Washington DC claims that 740 000 American jobs depend on economies ties with the Netherlands: due to exports from...

Where the UK government was not able to come up with a clear estimate of the impact of Brexit across sectors, Bart Los and Wen Chen, collaborating with Philip McCann (Sheffield) and Raquel Ortega-Argilés (Birmingham) have done so in a new policy briefing....

The WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) just released its biannual yearbook in a public launching event. This year's topic is "Intangible Capital in Global Value Chains"; the WIPO report  can be downloaded here. The underlying report, written...

Phillip McCann (Sheffield) will today present joint research with Bart Los at a conference that is organized as part of The UK in a Changing Europe initiative. The presentation focuses on the regional exposure to Brexit of regions in the UK and in Europe, ...

Gaaitzen de Vries presented recent work with Sébastien Miroudot and Marcel Timmer on functional specialization in international trade at an UNCTAD expert meeting on October 26. The meeting included contributions from the minister of industry and...

The research of Marianna Papakonstantinou is featured in Trouw (in Dutch): she finds that countries with greater emigration subsequently experience faster growth in knowledge-intensive industries. This implies that factors such as return migration,...

Bart Los presents today at a workshop organised by IVIE in Valencia on the World Input Output Database and the research on 'peak trade', based on the paper An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release.

Bart Los presented at the European Regional Science Association Congress held in the last week of August, in Groningen. Bart presented recent work on the "GDP exposure to Brexit" of regions on both sides of the Channel. The study, co-authored by Wen Chen...

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar each organised a session at the 4th annual conference of the Society for Economic Measurement, at MIT, from July 26 to 28. The session by Marcel Timmer was on trade and global value chains and included presentations by Robe...

Marcel Timmer presents on 'International Production Fragmentation and the Global Trade Slowdown' at a conference at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Other presenters include Sam Kortum, Stephen Yeaple and Costas Arkolakis. This...

On the (Dutch) Kennislink website, Robert Inklaar discusses how the spread of robots is a challenge for those with jobs involving routine tasks, yet embracing robots may be preferable to jobs disappearing overseas.

Robert Inklaar presented joint work with Jutta Bolt, Jan Luiten van Zanden and Herman de Jong at the International Comparison Conference in Princeton on May 25. The presentation reported on progress towards a new version of the Maddison Project Database on...

Global trade is no longer expanding as it used to, in part because Chinese consumption is shifting towards services produced at home (see the underlying paper). The Financieel Dagblad discusses this research in an article about Dutch exports to Germany....

The Reformatorisch Dagblad reported last Saturday about the stagnating growth of world trade, interviewing Marcel Timmer about the drivers and consequences of this development. For the research by Timmer and other about the drivers of the global trade...

Bart Los is presenting today at the Eurostat conference on New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics 2017 on how the research on global value chains has used existing data and how official statistics could be improved to shed better light on...

Wen Chen, Reitze Gouma and Marcel Timmer have prepared two reports as background for the upcoming World Intellectual Property Report 2017. The reports aim to measure the importance of intangible assets in global value chains. They were presented on March...

Jutta Bolt is presenting today in the Economic History Seminar at the London School of Economics (LSE) on project, jointly with PhD student Prince Young Aboagye on "Doing well while doing good? Long-term trends in income inequality in Ghana 1895-2015".

Marcel Timmer today presents new research, jointly by Wen Chen and Bart Los, on measuring the returns to intangible capital in global value chains at a conference of the NBER's Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) on Measuring and Accounting...

Today, Gaaitzen de Vries will give a lecture in the World Trade Organization's Trade Dialogues Lectures. His contribution to this series, which has seen earlier contributions by David Dorn (U. of Zürich), Eric Verhoogen (Columbia) and others, focuses on...

In an interview with the (Dutch) Financieel Dagblad, Marcel Timmer argues that the current era of production fragmentation makes it less likely that a trade war will flare up: "Lobbying for protection from foreign competition only makes sense if a...

On January 13, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) held a workshop on the opportunities for research using linked employer-employee data (LEED). This workshop was co-organized by Gaaitzen de Vries. One of the strengths of LEED is that it is possible to track...

Leandro Prados de la Escosura, who holds the Maddison Chair in Groningen, has just published a VOX column discussing his recent project, in which he has reconstructed the National Accounts for Spain back to 1850, i.e. some 100 years before official...

Robert Inklaar lectures today at the European Investment Bank about Inequality and GDP. He will argue that our understanding of income differences across countries depends crucially on accurate and frequent comparisons of prices across countries as...

Gaaitzen de Vries spoke last Monday at the World Bank conference on 'Making Global Value Chains work for Development'. This conference brought together experts discussing the measurement, trends and determinants of global value chains. Gaaitzen talked...

On June 28–30, we organise a conference to celebrate the 25 year anniversary of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) in Het Kasteel in Groningen. The conference will feature many prominent speakers: Dale Jorgenson (Harvard) will give an...

NRC, a Dutch daily newspaper, has just published an interview with Marcel Timmer centred around the report on peak trade, An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release. The title of the article is telling: "The politician who aims...

VoxEU now also has a column on the recent report on peak trade, An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release.

Marcel Timmer is due to speak at the Fourth IMF Statistical Forum, "Lifting the small boats: statistics for inclusive growth". This forum addresses current challenges faced by statisticians in capturing globalization, inequality, financial inclusion, and...

The (Dutch) Financieel Dagblad reports on new GGDC research: An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release. This paper is based on the newly released WIOD data and analyses why global trade has not grown as rapidly since 2008 as...

Bart Los presents at the OECD's 31st Meeting of the Working Party on Territorial Indicators on new indicators of participation in global value chains at the regional level. These are based on regionally disaggregated World Input Output Tables that have...

Marcel Timmer gave a keynote lecture on this topic at a conference organised by the Bank of Lithuania, which also included speakers such as Richard Baldwin, Fabio Ghironi, and Laura Alfaro. The presented research, jointly by Timmer, Bart Los, Gaaitzen de...

The New York Times Magazine picked up research by Bart Los, Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries: "Last year, economists at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, said that by their very rough estimates total foreign demand for Chinese goods may...

GGDC researchers played several important roles at the recent General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW), in Dresden. This biennial conference brings together academic researchers and official...

The Economist uses data from the Penn World Table to illustrate how Vietnam's growth in GDP per capita over de past quarter century matches China's growth experience following its liberalizing reforms in the late 1970s.

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar presented their research at the 2016 conference of the Society for Economic Measurement. Marcel Timmer presented a framework for measuring productivity when production is fragmented across borders and prices are imperfectly...

Bart Los and Erik Dietzenbacher are teaching a module on Structural Decomposition Analysis as part of the International School of Input-Output Analysis on Monday July 4, ahead of the International Input-Output Conference in Seoul, Korea.

The Guardian has written about the report by Bart Los and others on regional support for Brexit and dependence on the EU.

Ahead of Britain's referendum on EU membership, Bart Los has co-authored a study with Philip McCann, John Springford, and Mark Thissen. 

Can we still classify an entire industry as technology intensive? At a workshop of the US National Science Foundation, Bart Los argued that this is an outdated perspective in a time when electronics manufacturing in one country may involve the development...

Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer presented at a conference at MIT on International Comparisons of Income, Prices, and Production, on the upcoming update to version 9 of the Penn World Table. Participants included Nobel laureate Angus Deaton (Princeton),...

Gaaitzen de Vries, Abdul Azeez Erumban and Marcel Timmer presented at the fourth World KLEMS conference in Madrid on May 23 and 24 on issues of productivity and global value chains

Robert Inklaar has won the WF Duisenberg Fellowship Prize, awarded every two years to the best young applied macroeconomist in the Netherlands. The jury praised his publication record and contribution to policy debates. On receiving the prize, he discussed...

ABC espana, amongst other Spanish media, covered the main highlights of the fourth World KLEMS conference. This conference was organised by IVIE in cooperation with Harvard University and the GGDC.

Marcel Timmer discusses in an interview in Het Financieel Dagblad (in Dutch) how improved data collection and analysis leads to greater insights in the export performance of countries. Important insights relate to the interconnectedness of manufacturing...

Marcel Timmer was an advisor to the temporary committee of the Dutch Parliament (Tweede Kamer) on the measurement of welfare. The report of commission, titled "Welvaart in Kaart" (Mapping Welfare), is available here.

A recent study, by CEPR and LSE, shows that if Britain leaves the European Union, the costs in terms of lower living standards would be substantial. The economic model that was used relies on the data of the World Input-Output Database.

Global trade has grown faster than global GDP for decades, but this pattern has recently reversed. Accounting for this slowdown is the aim of new research by that is presented today at a conference on "Productivity and External Balancing", jointly...

Today's Financieel Dagblad (Dutch only) writes about the recent report on Dutch competitiveness by Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries. The article and report discuss how services industries in the Netherlands add a growing share of the value of exports...

On Wednesday January 20, VNO-NCW and MKB-Nederland have organized 'De dag van de Industrie 2016' (the day of industry 2016) at the Nieuwspoort in the Hague. During that day, Gaaitzen de Vries will present the main outcomes from a report he and Marcel...

We were very happy that a committee of esteemed colleagues recognized the usefulness of our research and database development efforts in the national Research Review of the faculty's research school, SOM. This helped contribute to the faculty's research...

Gaaitzen de Vries will present today at the Asian Develoment Bank's 'Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2016 Conference' on the topic of global value chains and job dynamics. This three-day conference has a number of other notable speakers, such as...

A recent discussion on VoxEU about trends in world GDP illustrates how the wider use of Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) would lead to figures that are more readily plausible and easier to interpret.

Herman de Jong and Marcel Timmer contributed to the KVS Preadviezen “De match tussen mens en machine” [The match between man and machine], edited by Bas ter Weel. They presented their contributions at the Behandeling van de KVS Preadviezen in The Hague.

Marcel Timmer participated in a round table discussion on 'Future Trends in the Economics of Growth', where he talked about the need for more work on growth of welfare, rather than GDP; see his presentation. The round table was hosted by Mark Sanders of...

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert meeting on the Dutch economy in Global Value Chains organized by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the recent report by De Vries and Timmer on the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for...

Gauging the strength of the Netherlands of a trading nation and analysing where it specialises should use data on trade in value added, rather than the traditional gross trade statistics. Well-known to experts, but Marcel Timmer's research in the...

While advanced economies grew rich from specialising in manufacturing and employing a large share of the labor force in this sector, the research of Dani Rodrik suggests that path is no longer available to lower-income economies today. How does he know...

Gaaitzen de Vries and Marcel Timmer finished a report for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairsand VNO/NCW titled: “Dutch Manufacturing Competing in Global Value Chains”. The report stresses the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for the...

Reitze Gouma gave a presentation on the occasion of the launch of the FAO's new agricultural productivity database, indicating how incorporating measurement lessons from EU KLEMS would be beneficial.

Gaaitzen de Vries completed a consultancy report on ‘Global Value Chain Specialization Patterns of Sweden and Its Key Competitors’ for Tillväxtanalys (Stockholm, Sweden). The analysis shows that Austria and the Netherlands are emerging as key competitors...

Robert Inklaar presented research-in-progress with Jutta Bolt at a World Bank meeting. The main question is whether the World Bank's approach to measuring global poverty does adequate justice to cross-country differences and whether a new method for...

El Pais reports on the changing structure of world trade using data from the World Input-Output Database (in Spanish).

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert seminar organised by the European Commission's DG EMPL and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on structural change.