This project embarks on the second stage of a journey to map the contours of incomes and prices over six continents and more than seven centuries. The data expedition seeks better answers to questions of perennially broad interest: Who was more productive than whom in the past? Who lived better than whom, and why? Was there an early modern great divergence between Western Europe and Eastern Asia, or did their differences antedate Columbus or even the Black Death? The 2007-2008 second stage will offer three kinds of outputs already introduced in the first stage: (1) Fresh historical data, especially from East Asia; (2) public provision of downloadable historical data, converted into modern metric units; and (3) fresh intellectual interpretations of historic movements in relative incomes around the world.
On the fresh data front, this second round will concentrate on offering new quantitative histories of incomes and prices in East Asia. The quantitative frontiers will be (partially) pushed back to earlier centuries for China, pre-Tokugawa Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the early modern Dutch enclaves. Thanks to the provision of downloadable data, the world''s historians and journalists can save years of effort by this project having converted all measures to metric, backed by detailed and transparent source documentation, caveats, and guides to further data sets. This stage of the project also reinterprets the patterns that seem to be emerging in the historical data. Robert Allen and collaborators reinterpret the roles of energy supply, agriculture, institutions, and other forces in Britain''s Industrial Revolution. Philip Hoffman quantifies and explains the changes in the costliness of defending property rights. Jan Luiten van Zanden maps and interprets the rise of Northwest Europe''s pro-accumulation structure of prices and interest rates. And Marianne Ward andJohn Devereux align index-number economics with the task of comparing national accounts between 1870 and 1950.
The project has already created the new Global Price and Income History group. This diverse set of 23 scholars from several countries will continue to deliver data and interpretations of broad interest (12 are funded by this award), and will become a major presence in the study of world economic history. The whole design of the project targets an audience of non-specialists and non-academics. The scientific team has set up mechanisms for prompt public on-line access to its main data sets and its results, through the internet site at UC Davis, in the Netherlands, and at other linked sites. Furthermore, the team includes many who have written non-technical works for the general public -- as professional historians, as authors of textbooks, and as teachers. The project''s estimates will eventually serve many users of the Penn World Tables, including the UN, the World Bank, the OECD, other public agencies, and the media.
