Link of the Month -- Angus Maddison's
The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective

Anyone concerned with the long-run history of the financial markets cannot help but be interested in the broad sweep of human economic history. Angus Maddison, a Scottish economic historian at the University of Groningen in Holland, has devoted his life to chronicling the world's economic and population growth over the centuries. His output is prodigious, with a staggering list of monographs and academic articles.

His first effort, Monitoring the World Economy 1820-1992, although a cult classic among development economists, suffered from a lack of production and editing effort by the sponsoring organization (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective corrects these deficits and extends the scope almost to the end of the millennium. Want to know the inflation-adjusted growth of GDP or population in Italy from Roman times to the Renaissance? The economic fallout of the Meiji Reformation in Japan? Capital flows in early colonial India? It's all here. A tiny example of the kind of data available from Maddison's tome is shown below, a plot on per-share earnings growth used elsewhere in this issue:

This book is hard to purchase. But if you want to own it, I recommend logging onto its listing at BestBookBuys.com. Alternatively, the most reliable (and expensive) way to buy the book is to order it directly from the publisher at the OECD Online Bookshop.

Brad DeLong's eclectic Web site provides an excellent abstract of Maddison's book. At the bottom of the abstract, there is a link to the full pdf. Note that the pdf link is not consistently reliable; it seems to work best with Internet Explorer.

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