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 2022, in a format amenable to analysis in R.

The database was last updated in 2022.

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)

## Classes 'tbl_df', 'tbl' and 'data.frame':    131144 obs. of  9 variables:
##  $ countrycode: chr  "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" ...
##  $ country    : chr  "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" ...
##  $ region     : chr  "South Asia" "South Asia" "South Asia" "South Asia" ...
##  $ year       : num  1 730 1000 1090 1150 ...
##  $ gdppc      : num  NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
##  $ pop        : num  NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
##  $ iso2c      : chr  "AF" "AF" "AF" "AF" ...
##  $ iso3c      : chr  "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" "AFG" ...
##  $ continent  : chr  "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" ...

head(maddison)

##   countrycode     country     region year gdppc pop iso2c iso3c continent
## 1         AFG Afghanistan South Asia    1    NA  NA    AF   AFG      Asia
## 2         AFG Afghanistan South Asia  730    NA  NA    AF   AFG      Asia
## 3         AFG Afghanistan South Asia 1000    NA  NA    AF   AFG      Asia
## 4         AFG Afghanistan South Asia 1090    NA  NA    AF   AFG      Asia
## 5         AFG Afghanistan South Asia 1150    NA  NA    AF   AFG      Asia
## 6         AFG Afghanistan South Asia 1252    NA  NA    AF   AFG      Asia

df <- subset(maddison, 
             year >= 1800 &
             iso2c %in% c("DEU", "FRA", "ITA", "GBR", "USA"))

ggplot(df, aes(x = year, y = gdppc, 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 (1800-2022)")

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.