Maddison Project Database

Introduction

This package contains the Maddison Project Database, which contains estimates of GDP per capita for all countries in the world between AD 1 and 2016, in a format amenable to analysis in R.

The database was last updated in 2018.

As per instructions on the Maddison Project website, please site the data as follows:

Attribution requirement - When using these data (for whatever purpose), please make the following reference: - Maddison Project Database, version 2018. Bolt, Jutta, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2018), “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: new income comparisons and the shape of long-run economic development”, Maddison Project Working paper 10 - For the references to the original research on individual countries, see Appendix A of Bolt et al. (2018).

Example use

library(maddison)
library(ggplot2)

str(maddison)

## tibble [19,873 x 12] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)
##  $ countrycode: chr [1:19873] "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" ...
##  $ country    : chr [1:19873] "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" ...
##  $ year       : num [1:19873] 1820 1870 1913 1950 1951 ...
##  $ cgdppc     : num [1:19873] NA NA NA 2392 2422 ...
##  $ rgdpnapc   : num [1:19873] NA NA NA 2392 2422 ...
##  $ pop        : num [1:19873] 3280 4207 5730 8150 8284 ...
##  $ i_cig      : chr [1:19873] NA NA NA "Extrapolated" ...
##  $ i_bm       : chr [1:19873] NA NA NA NA ...
##  $ iso2c      : chr [1:19873] "AF" "AF" "AF" "AF" ...
##  $ iso3c      : chr [1:19873] "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" ...
##  $ continent  : chr [1:19873] "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" ...
##  $ region     : chr [1:19873] "Southern Asia" "Southern Asia" "Southern Asia" "Southern Asia" ...

head(maddison)

## # A tibble: 6 x 12
##   countrycode country      year cgdppc rgdpnapc   pop i_cig    i_bm  iso2c iso3c
##   <chr>       <chr>       <dbl>  <dbl>    <dbl> <dbl> <chr>    <chr> <chr> <chr>
## 1 AFG         Afghanistan  1820     NA       NA  3280 <NA>     <NA>  AF    AFG  
## 2 AFG         Afghanistan  1870     NA       NA  4207 <NA>     <NA>  AF    AFG  
## 3 AFG         Afghanistan  1913     NA       NA  5730 <NA>     <NA>  AF    AFG  
## 4 AFG         Afghanistan  1950   2392     2392  8150 Extrapo~ <NA>  AF    AFG  
## 5 AFG         Afghanistan  1951   2422     2422  8284 Extrapo~ <NA>  AF    AFG  
## 6 AFG         Afghanistan  1952   2462     2462  8425 Extrapo~ <NA>  AF    AFG  
## # ... with 2 more variables: continent <chr>, region <chr>

df <- subset(maddison, 
             year >= 1800 &
             iso2c %in% c("DE", "FR", "IT", "UK", "US"))

ggplot(df, aes(x = year, y = rgdpnapc, color = country)) +
  geom_line() +
  scale_y_log10() +
  theme_bw() +
  labs(x = NULL, y = "GDP per capita (2011 U.S. dollars)\n", color = NULL,
       title = "GDP per capita (1800-2010)")

Disclaimer

This package is not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the Maddison Project. I aim to update it whenever the database is updated. If you ever see that it is out-of-date, don’t hesitate to send a pull request and/or remind me to update it.