Historical Development News

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...

Professors Abe de Jong and Herman de Jong received a grant of 160,000 euro for a UG ICT Innovation Fund Proposal titled Digitization of printed registries to structured data. The project’s idea is to deliver a machine learning-powered online platform to...

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...

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...

Jutta Bolt has been awarded a Wallenberg Academy Fellows prolongation grant for five years to investigate historical disease patterns in Africa. The current pandemic is a forceful reminder of the global importance of good health for all. But at the same...

As part of Marcel Timmer's VICI-project, a long-run time series of World Input-Output Tables for the period 1965-2000 has been constructed.

The original website of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), previously hosted at www.wiod.org, has been migrated to the GGDC website. An archived version of the original website is still available, but will no longer be updated. All information and...

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

Herman de Jong received a large NWO-OC grant funding a project to investigate the function of the Amsterdam stock exchange during the period 1870-1940. The aim of this project is to probe the stock exchange’s contribution to corporate finance and economic...

Jutta Bolt has just been appointed to one of the University of Groningen's Aletta Jacobs chairs. These chairs were created to give female associate professors a leg up, to achieve a less male-dominated professoriat. As GGDC, we heartily congratulate Jutta...

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

New research by Herman de Jong and María Gómez León, published in the Economic History Review, examines inequality in Germany and the United Kingdom in the first half of the twentieth century. Over this period, the developments have mirrored each other in...

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.

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...

A new column on VoxEU is online, discussing the new version of the Maddison Project Database, which was released two weeks ago. The key innovation is to distinguish two series for real GDP per capita, one best suited for comparing income levels across...

A new version of the Maddison Project Database has been released today. This new version introduces a new measure of real GDP per capita that is based on both modern and historical comparisons of income levels, leading to a 'multiple benchmark' measure...

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...

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".

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...

Jutta Bolt has been named as one of the 29 new Wallenberg Academy Fellows for 2016. This prestigious Swedish research grant by the Wallenberg Foundation of approximately €1mln will allow Jutta Bolt to devote more time to her research, in part at Lund...

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...

This upcoming Saturday, November 5, we welcome top economist Daron Acemoglu (MIT) to Groningen for the next Maddison lecture, on The Race of Man against Machine. In this public lecture, jointly organised with In the LEAD, we are looking forward to hearing...

On Saturday November 5, from 11:00–13:00, Daron Acemoglu of MIT will give the next Maddison lecture. Details to follow.

The GGDC Summer School 2016 took place between July 11 and 15 and featured several lectures by Branko Milanović, on inequality and the role of globalisation, as well as lectures by other renowned scholars. Around 25 students from all over the world...

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...

The paper ‘Long term trends in economic inequality: Lessons from colonial Botswana 1921–1974’ written by Jutta Bolt and Ellen Hillbom (Lund University) has been accepted for publication in the Economic History Review. The show a rise and subsequent decline...