Historical Data

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What you should know about this indicator
This GDP per capita indicator provides information on economic growth and income levels in the very long run. Some country estimates are available as far back as 1 CE and regional estimates as far back as 1820 CE.
This data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in the cost of living between countries.
This data is expressed in international-$ at 2011 prices, using a combination of 2011 and 1990 PPPs for historical data.
Time series for former countries and territories are calculated forward in time by estimating values based on their last official borders.
For more regularly updated estimates of GDP per capita, see the World Bank's indicator.

Real GDP per capita in 2011$

In two ways, this analysis leads to departures from the original Maddison approach and closer to the multiple benchmark approach as developed by the PWT. There is, to begin with, no doubt that the 2011 PPPs and the related estimates of GDP per capita reflect the relative levels of GDP per capita in the world economy today better than the combination of the 1990 benchmark and growth rates of GDP per capita according to national accounts. This information should be taken into account. At the same time, the underlying rule within the current Maddison Database is that economic growth rates of countries in the dataset should be identical or as close as possible to growth rates according to the national accounts (which is also the case for the pre 1990 period). For the post-1990 period we therefore decided to integrate the 2011 benchmarks by adapting the growth rates of GDP per capita in the period 1990–2011 to align the two (1990 and 2011) benchmarks. We estimated the difference between the combination of the 1990 benchmark and the growth rates of GDP (per capita) between 1990 and 2011 according to the national accounts, and annual growth rate from the 1990 benchmark to the 2011 benchmark. This difference is then evenly distributed to the growth rate of GDP per capita between 1990 and 2011; in other words, we added a country specific correction (constant for all years between 1990 and 2011) to the annual national account rate of growth to connect the 1990 benchmark to the 2011 benchmark. Growth after 2011 is, in the current update, exclusively based on the growth rates of GDP per capita according to national accounts.

We also use the collected set of historical benchmark estimates to fine tune the dataset for the pre-1940 period, but only in those cases where the quality of the benchmark was high and there were multiple benchmarks to support a revision. The most important correction concerns the US/UK comparison. The conventional picture, based on the original 1990 Maddison estimates, indicated that the US overtook the UK as the world leader in the early years of the 20th century. This finding was first criticized by Ward and Devereux (2003), who argued, based on alternative measures of PPP-adjusted benchmarks between 1870 and 1930, that the United States was already leading the United Kingdom in terms of GDP per capita in the 1870s. This conclusion was criticized by Broadberry (2003).

New evidence, however, suggests a more complex picture: in the 18th century, real incomes in the US (settler colonies only, not including indigenous populations) were probably higher than those in the UK (Lindert & Williamson, 2016a). Until about 1870, growth was both exten- sive (incorporating newly settled territory) and intensive (considering the growth of cities and industry at the east coast), but on balance, the US may—in terms of real income—have lagged behind the UK. After 1870, intensive growth becomes more important, and the US slowly gets the upper hand. This pattern is consistent with direct benchmark comparison of the income of both countries for the period 1907–1909 (Woltjer, 2015). This shows that GDP per capita for the United States in those years was 26% higher than in the United Kingdom. We have used Woltjer’s (2015) benchmark to correct the GDP series of the two countries. Projecting this benchmark into the 19th century with the series of GDP per capita of both countries results in the two countries achieving parity in 1880. This is close to Prados de la Escosura’s conjecture based on his short- cut method (Prados de la Escosura, 2000), and even closer to the Lindert and Williamson (2016a) results.