A Dataset on Comparative Historical National Accounts, ca.1870-1950: A Time-Series Perspective

This paper accompanies the Historical National Accounts datahub which presents an overview of the currently available studies on long-term economic growth across countries. Now that more and more detailed historical national accounts have become available, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) in collaboration with the Department of Economic History of the London School of Economics (LSE) has initiated a new research project aiming to enhance our knowledge on comparative economic performance. The basic idea of this datahub is to bring together the available, but fragmented, data on GDP at the industry level for all major economies and to standardise these series to make a consistent long run international comparison of output and productivity feasible. GDP data and their components are presented in local currencies, both at current as well as constant prices.