Libros: Measuring Wellbeing: A History of Italian Living Standards

Giovanni Vecchi publicó Measuring Wellbeing: A History of Italian Living Standards, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvii + 645 pp., $99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-19-994459-0), que fue reseñado para EH.net por Chiara Natalie Focacci, Andrea Incerpi, Marco Molteni, Giovanni Maria Pala, y Andrea Ramazzotti. Ellos señalan: "Measuring Wellbeing offers a multidimensional, quantitative analysis of Italian living standards from the country’s unification in 1861 to the present day. In doing so, it goes beyond the misleading identification of living standards with strictly monetary indexes, broadening the focus to include measures of physical wellbeing and social indicators... 

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Ver enlace a información sobre el libro aquí

Bases de datos: Historical Household Budgets Project

El proyecto Historical Household Budgets pretende reunir información sobre los presupuestos de hogares de los últimos dos siglos para analizar los cambios de largo plazo. En su presentación señalan que el enfoque inicial es la construcción de una base de datos de múltiples temas de los presupuestos de los hogares desde 1800 hasta la actualidad, junto con las medidas asociadas de los niveles de vida. La base de datos histórica de presupuestos de hogares (HHBD) disponible para investigadores incluye cerca de 500 variables, entre ellas: consumo, ingresos y riqueza, salarios y precios al por menor, educación y salud, antropometría y fertilidad, empleo y migración, vivienda, agricultura, acceso al crédito y exposición a los shocks, provenientes de diversas fuentes. Una iniciativa complementaria es la creación de una red de investigadores que comparten datos y desarrollan técnicas para trabajar con los presupuestos de los hogares. Una serie documentos de trabajo promueve la difusión de la investigación en curso.

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The initial focus of the HHB project is the construction of a multi-topic database of household budgets from 1800 to the present day, together with associated measures of living standards. The Historical Household Budgets Database (HHBD) comprises ca. 500 variables including consumption, income and wealth, wages and retail prices, education and health, anthropometrics and fertility, employment and migration, housing, agriculture, access to credit, and exposure to shocks. The HHBD, along with an extensive collection of references is made available to scholars around the world.

A complementary initiative is the creation of a network of researchers who provide and share data, further develop techniques for working with household budgets not collected in the context of modern probabilistic surveys, and undertake substantive research into the history of poverty and inequality. Without imposing top-down direction, the HHB project provides a degree of coordination and direction to the collective effort of this network. A dedicated working paper series promotes the dissemination of on-going research

The initial focus of the HHB project is the construction of a multi-topic database of household budgets from 1800 to the present day, together with associated measures of living standards. The Historical Household Budgets Database (HHBD) comprises ca. 500 variables including consumption, income and wealth, wages and retail prices, education and health, anthropometrics and fertility, employment and migration, housing, agriculture, access to credit, and exposure to shocks. The HHBD, along with an extensive collection of references is made available to scholars around the world.

A complementary initiative is the creation of a network of researchers who provide and share data, further develop techniques for working with household budgets not collected in the context of modern probabilistic surveys, and undertake substantive research into the history of poverty and inequality. Without imposing top-down direction, the HHB project provides a degree of coordination and direction to the collective effort of this network. A dedicated working paper series promotes the dissemination of on-going research

Artículos: How Well Did Facts Travel to Support Protracted Debate on the History of the Great Divergence between Western Europe and Imperial China?

Deng, Kent y Patrick O'Brien publicaron How Well Did Facts Travel to Support Protracted Debate on the History of the Great Divergence between Western Europe and Imperial China? En el resumen informan: "This paper tackles the issue of how reliable the currently circulated 'facts' really are regarding the 'Great Divergence' debate. Our findings indicate strongly that 'facts' of premodern China are often of low quality and fragmented. Consequently, the application of these 'facts' can be misleading and harmful." Ver enlace acá

Artículo: Spain’s Historical National Accounts: Expenditure and Output, 1850-2015

Leandro Prados de la Escosura publicó Spain’s HistoricalNational Accounts: Expenditure and Output, 1850-2015, una actualización de sus estadísticas históricas de cuentas nacionales españolas. Leemos en el abstract "This essay offers a new set of historical GDP estimates from the demand and supply sides that revises and expands those in Prados de la Escosura (2003) and provides the basis to investigate Spain’s long run economic growth. It presents a reconstruction of production and expenditure series for the century prior to the introduction of modern national accounts. Then, it splices available national accounts sets over the period 1958-2015 through interpolation, as an alternative to conventional retropolation. The resulting national accounts series are linked to the ‘pre-statistical era’ estimates providing yearly series for GDP and its components since 1850. On the basis of new population estimates, GDP per head is derived. Trends in GDP per head are, then, drawn and, using new employment estimates, decomposed into labour productivity and the amount of work per person, and placed into international perspective"

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Ver también datos en Measuring Worth

Artículos: China’s GDP Per Capita from the Han Dynasty to Communist Times

Kent Deng (London School of Economics) y  Patrick Karl O’Brien (University of London) son los autores de un reciente artículo de la serie Economic History Working Papers (LSE): China’s GDP Per Capita from the Han Dynasty to Communist Times. Su abstract nos informa "Our article is a critical survey of the concepts and data utilized by economists and economic historians that purport to measure relative levels and long term trends in GDP per capita from the Han Dynasty to Communist times. We favour attempts to extend macro-economic analysis and its associated quantification to China’s long imperial history, but have concluded that estimates calibrated in international dollars for 1900, or 2005 or 2011 are not fit for that purpose. Furthermore, and after surveying recent endeavours to reconstruct the published secondary and official statistical sources available for the measurement of primary production for Ming and Qing China (1368-1911), we reluctantly suggest that Kuznetian paradigms for empirical economics are probably not viable, either for the measurement of the empire’s growth over time or for reciprocal comparisons with European economies. This is because on both conceptual and statistical grounds the concept and associated metric for GDP per capita does not travel easily and securely between the fiscal systems of China and the West (Yun-Casallila and O’Brien 2012)."

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Artículos: Distribución funcional del ingreso en la Argentina, 1950-2007

Susana Kidyba y Daniel Vega (de CEPAL) publicaron Distribución funcional del ingreso en la Argentina, 1950-2007. En su resumen leemos "En el presente documento la CEPAL retoma su interés por la generación de información histórica para brindar a los analistas las herramientas necesarias para estudiar el desarrollo económico desde una perspectiva de largo plazo. El objetivo de este trabajo en particular ha sido la construcción de una serie histórica homogénea de la distribución funcional del ingreso en la Argentina para el período 1950-2007 que sea de utilidad para el estudio de la generación del ingreso."

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Estadísticas: CepalStat

CEPALSTAT constituye el portal de acceso a la información estadística de los países de América Latina y el Caribe que recopila, sistematiza y difunde la CEPAL. Este portal permite acceder a las estadísticas e indicadores periódicos internacionalmente comparables de los países de América Latina y el Caribe, que se generan en las diferentes Divisiones de la CEPAL. Se puede acceder a publicaciones estadísticas de carácter periódico de CEPAL y a los anexos estadísticos de las publicaciones analíticas.

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Libros: La produzione industriale delle regioni d’Italia, 1861-1913: una ricostruzione quantitativa.

Es interesante la reseña realizada para Eh.net por Emanuele Felice, del departamento de Economía e Historia Económica de la  Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, de las siguientes obras: 

• Carlo Ciccarelli y Stefano Fenoaltea, La produzione industriale delle regioni d’Italia, 1861-1913: una ricostruzione quantitativa. 1. Le industrie non manifatturiere. Roma: Banca d’Italia, 2009. xlviii + 499 pp., BNI: 2010-2273 
• Carlo Ciccarelli y Stefano Fenoaltea, La produzione industriale delle regioni d’Italia, 1861-1913: una ricostruzione quantitativa, 2. Le industrie estrattivo-manifatturiere. Roma: Banca d’Italia, 2014. v + 677 pp., ISBN: 978-88-6507-676-7.

En la reseña leemos: "In the last ten years Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea have been carrying out a remarkable research program, with the goal of providing yearly series of the industrial production of Italy’s regions, running from the unification of the country (1861) until the eve of World War I, at a level of sectoral detail and historical accuracy probably unparalleled in the rest of the world.

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Bases de Datos: Global Price and Income History Group

En el sitio de Global Price and Income History Group pueden explorarse estadísticas de precios, ingresos y bienestar  previos a 1950, para diferentes regiones del mundo. 

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Artículo: Productivity Growth during the British Industrial Revolution: Revisionism Revisited

Nicholas Crafts presentó su artículo Productivity Growth during the British Industrial Revolution: Revisionism Revisited, en la 50th Anniversary conference of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Downing College, Cambridge. En su abstract resume "This paper re-examines output and productivity growth during the British industrial revolution in the light of recent research. Revised estimates are presented which incorporate new findings on the structure of employment, in particular, that the level of industrialization in the mid-18th century is now known to be considerably higher than was assumed in earlier work. This implies that industrial labour productivity growth was faster than believed by authors of the 1980s but still slower than earlier writers claimed. It is shown that in most important respects the Crafts-Harley view of macroeconomic growth remains basically intact."

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Ver sobre el autor aquí

Bases de datos: Series de datos históricos

Un buen punto de partida para buscar datos (básicamente europeos, de cuentas nacionales, datos políticos, salarios, precios, población, clima, comercio, transporte, tecnología, entre otros). Para revisar, este sitio está vinculado al libro  An Economic History of Europe de Karl Gunnar Persson (Cambridge University Press, February 2010)

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Ver también  Support for teachers.

Bases de Datos: Estadísticas históricas: Exportaciones de países en dearrollo

Retomando la difusión de diversas bases de datos disponibles para comparar y contrastar, reproducimos un link de interés a estadísticas de exportaciones de países en desarrollo para 1840, 1860, 1880 y 1900, elaboradas por John R. Hanson en su libro Trade in Transition: Exports from the Third World, 1840-1900, New York: Academic Press, 1980.

Ver enlace aquí
Ver enlace directo a la planilla excel acá

Estadísticas: The First Update of the Maddison Project Re-Estimating Growth Before 1820

En el marco del Proyecto Maddison iniciado en marzo de 2010, con el esfuerzo de actualización encarado por un grupo de sus colegas cercanos, Jutta Bolt y Jan Luiten van Zanden publicaron The First Update of the Maddison Project. Re-Estimating Growth Before 1820. Allí se pretende inventariar los recientes resultados de la investigación en cuentas nacionales históricas, discutir brevemente algunos problemas relevantes a las estadísticas, a la vez que extender y revisar las estimaciones publicadas por Maddison (2001; 2003; 2007, ver enlace acá) 

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Libros: World Economic Performance: Past, Present and Future

D.S. Prasada Rao y Bart van Ark han editado World Economic Performance: Past, Present and Future. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2013. ix + 432 pp. $160 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84844-848-3. La reseña (para EH.net) de Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Departamento de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Carlos III) sostiene: "This volume commemorates the late Angus Maddison’s distinguished academic life and provides an idea of his wide range of intellectual interests and drive. As time goes by it becomes evident how Maddison’s approach changed the way economic historians address long-run growth. As late as the early 1980s, the study of industrialization (economic growth was not a fashionable term yet) mainly focused on sector analysis in which agricultural transformation played a major role while services were largely neglected. Maddison’s Phases of Capitalist Development (1982) led economic historians to investigate past experiences of growth with the tools used to analyze contemporary societies. As this approach required macroeconomic data, Maddison persuaded colleagues across the world to undertake the construction of historical national accounts. At the same time, in Groningen, he led a team researching international GDP comparisons. On this basis Maddison produced his widel! y used historical statistics of purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per head and stimulated scholars to pursue similar avenues of research as evidenced by the Maddison Project. In World Economic Performance a group of Maddison’s friends and students contribute ten papers initially presented at conferences held to celebrate his eightieth birthday.

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Artículo:Performance Dynamics in an Historical Perspective

Vadim Khramov y John Ridings Lee publicaron The Economic Performance Index (EPI): an Intuitive Indicator for Assessing a Country's Economic Performance. Dynamics in an Historical Perspective. Buscan elaborar un índice consolidado para medir la performance económica de una región geográfica. El abstract apunta: "Existing economic indicators and indexes assess economic activity but no single indicator measures the general macro-economic performance of a nation, state, or region in a methodologically simple and intuitive way. This paper proposes a simple, yet informative metric called the Economic Performance Index (EPI). The EPI represents a step toward clarity, by combining data on inflation, unemployment, government deficit, and GDP growth into a single indicator. In contrast to other indexes, the EPI does not use complicated mathematical procedures but was designed for simplicity, making it easier for professionals and laypeople alike to understand and apply to the economy. To maximize ease of understanding, we adopt a descriptive grading system. In addition to a Raw EPI that gives equal weights to its components, we construct a Weighted EPI and show that both indexes perform similarly for U.S. data. To demonstrate the validity of the EPI, we conduct a review of U.S. history from 1790 to 2012. We show that the EPI reflects the major events in U.S. history, including wars, periods of economic prosperity and booms, along with economic depressions, recessions, and even panics. Furthermore, the EPI not only captures official recessions over the past century but also allows for measuring and comparing their relative severity. Even though the EPI is simple by its construction, we show that its dynamics are similar to those of the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) and The Conference Board Coincident Economic Index® (CEI)."

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Artículos: Accounting for the little and the great divergence

Recientemente se han publicado trabajos sobre la contabilidad del crecimiento de la Pequeña y la Gran Divergencia, respectivamente.

Alexandra M. de Pleijt y Jan Luiten van Zanden prepararon Accounting for the ‘Little Divergence’ What drove economic growth in preindustrial Europe, 1300-1800? En su resumen leemos: "The Little Divergence is the process of differential economic growth within Europe in the period between 1300 and 1800, during which the North Sea Area developed into the most prosperous and dynamic part of the Continent. We test various hypotheses about the causes of the Little Divergence, using new data and focusing on rends in GDP per capita. The results are that institutional changes (in particular the rise of active Parliaments), human capital formation and structural change are the primary drivers of the growth that occurred, which contrast sharply with previous findings by Robert Allen (who however focused on real wages as dependent variable). We also test for the role of religion (the spread of Protestantism): this has affected human capital formation, but does not in itself have an impact on growth. Moreover, we find an insignificant effect of the land-labour ratio, which shows the limitations of the malthusian model for understanding the Little Divergence."

Por su parte, Stephen Broadberry escribió Accounting for the Great Divergence, cuyo abstract resume “As a result of recent work on historical national accounting, it is now possible to establish firmly the timing of the Great Divergence of living standards between Europe and Asia. There was a European Little Divergence as Britain and Holland overtook Italy and Spain, and an Asian Little Divergence as Japan overtook China and India. The Great Divergence occurred because Japan grew more slowly than Britain and Holland, starting from a lower level. Key turning points are identified around 1348 and 1500, and an explanatory framework is developed that can explain these divergences via the differential impact of shocks on differently structured economies. The key shocks were the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century and the new trade routes which opened up from Europe to Asia and the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century. The key structural factors were the type of agriculture, the age of first marriage of females, the flexibility of labour supply and the nature of state institutions.”

Artículos: On the accuracy of export growth in Argentina, 1870-1913

Antonio Tena Junguito y Henry Willebald han publicado On the accuracy of export growth in Argentina, 1870-1913, cuyas versiones preliminares, presentadas en el seminario Trade and Poverty en Madrid en 2012 y en CLADHE III (Barriloche, 2012), XVIth WEHC (Stellenbosch,2012), fueron revisadas con los aportes de Roberto Cortes Conde, y comentarios de Gerry de la Paolera, Luis Bértola, Agustina Rayes, Jeffrey Williamson. En su resumen se lee "Argentine export growth before the First World War is considered one of the most relevant variables in order to understand the main characteristics of Argentina’s long-run modern economic growth properly. The lack of accuracy of the official export series, especially the relative official values used, lies behind some of the controversies and doubts of the historiography when addressing the causes and consequences of Argentina’s international convergence. We have used empirical evidence to test the accuracy of quantities and value exports records, first, according to their import partners’ records and, second, according to international market prices. Results show that the hypothesis of export price undervaluation bias is correct. In the light of these results we reconstructed a new Argentine export f.o.b. values and price index using international prices valued in pounds sterling which allows us to offer a new proposal indicating a more dynamic Argentine export growth during the Belle Époque years"

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Artículos: Output per head in pre-independence Africa: quantitative conjectures

Leandro Prados de la Escosura ha publicado "Output per head in pre-independence Africa: quantitative conjectures", donde reinterpreta las estadísticas de crecimiento africanas. En su resumen se lee: "GDP figures for Africa are unreliable. More dependable information can be found in overnment expenditure and international trade records. These records, though, provide ittle insight into non-market output. In this paper an attempt is made to draw explicit conjectures on real output per head in preindependence Africa on the basis of trade data so that conjectures can be established about Africa’s long-run growth. Two alternative approaches are considered. One estimates per capita GDP by assuming no increase in output per head outside the tradable sector, for which the purchasing power of per capita exports is accepted as a proxy. Another approach establishes an econometric association between real per capita GDP and the income terms of trade per head for 1950-1990 and, on the basis of the prediction equation’s parameters and the values of the RHS variables, infers real output per head for 1870-1938. Trends in real output per head are then drawn for Africa (and its main regions). By comparing these trends with those from other developing regions, some conjectures about Africa’s relative position over time are put forward. It emerges that economic growth started earlier than usually assumed and there is continuity in growth before and after colonial independence. Sub- Saharan Africa’s retardation is a gradual process, as growing and falling behind took place simultaneously. But it is in the period 1975-1995 when the worst setback in modern Africa’s history took place."

 

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Estadísticas históricas: “200 años de economía argentina en cifras”

Traemos a consideración una obra de recopilación de estadísticas históricas de Argentina, con punto de partida en 1810. Leemos en la introducción de Orlando J Ferreres a la segunda edición: ".....Nos propusimos hacer nosotros mismos la historia de Argentina en cifras, acordándonos de Manuel Belgrano en Rosario cuando dijo: “Teniendo que enarbolar bandera y no teniéndola, la mande a hacer yo mismo, de color celeste y blanco la mandé a hacer”. Desde aquel año iniciamos la búsqueda de todo tipo de datos desde 1810......El trabajo resultó ser mucho mas difícil de lo que parecía y explica quizá por qué no fue hecho antes.La principal razón de este trabajo... es dar una adecuada continuidad de país, aunque al menos sea en las cifras. Otra razón, conectada con la anterior es poder observar la tendencia de larga duración.

Estadísticas históricas: Uruguay 1870-2011

Nicolás Bonino Gayoso, Carolina Román y Henry Willebald han publicado el documento de trabajo  "PIB y estructura productiva en Uruguay (1870-2011): Revisión de series históricas y discusión metodológica" 

En el abstract se lee: "La construcción y sistematización de series históricas del PIB y sus componentes ha tomado un renovado vigor en los últimos años (CEPAL 2009, Smits et al. 2009,Timmer y De Vries 2007). El interés analítico en el desarrollo económico comparado de los países –asícomo los esfuerzos de contabilización macroeconómica de largo plazo – han alentado ese campo del conocimiento. En Uruguay, las series oficiales de Cuentas Nacionales comienzan en 1955 y, para el período anterior, se cuenta con varias estimaciones, con metodologías y coberturas diversas que brindan resultados diferentes. Factores como el reciente cambio de base dispuesto por el Banco Central del Uruguay, los diversos indicadores de bienestar que se basan en el desempeño de la economía y los repetidos requerimientos de dimensionar variables al tamaño de la economía, conducen a la necesidad de contar con una sistematización de las estimaciones disponibles. El propósito de este documento es generar una serie homogénea y consistente del PIB en Uruguay en el largo plazo (1870-2011)...