Introduction

This package contains the Maddison Project Dataset with estimates of GDP per capita for all countries in the world between AD 1 and 2010 in a format amenable to analysis in R.

The database was last updated in January 2013.

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

Purpose Citation
When using the data The Maddison-Project, http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm, 2013 version.
When refering to underlying methodology and main results Bolt, J. and J. L. van Zanden (2014). The Maddison Project: collaborative research on historical national accounts. The Economic History Review, 67 (3): 627–651. When using individual country data
When using individual country data See country-source references in the appendix of Bolt and van Zanden (2014).

Example use

library(maddison)
library(ggplot2)

str(maddison)
## Classes 'tbl_df', 'tbl' and 'data.frame':    45318 obs. of  9 variables:
##  $ year            : Date, format: "0001-01-01" "0730-01-01" ...
##  $ country_original: chr  "Austria" "Austria" "Austria" "Austria" ...
##  $ gdp_pc          : num  NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
##  $ country         : chr  "Austria" "Austria" "Austria" "Austria" ...
##  $ iso2c           : chr  "AT" "AT" "AT" "AT" ...
##  $ iso3c           : chr  "AUT" "AUT" "AUT" "AUT" ...
##  $ continent       : chr  "Europe" "Europe" "Europe" "Europe" ...
##  $ region          : chr  "Western Europe" "Western Europe" "Western Europe" "Western Europe" ...
##  $ aggregate       : logi  FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE ...
head(maddison)
## Source: local data frame [6 x 9]
## 
##         year country_original gdp_pc country iso2c iso3c continent
##       (date)            (chr)  (dbl)   (chr) (chr) (chr)     (chr)
## 1 0001-01-01          Austria     NA Austria    AT   AUT    Europe
## 2 0730-01-01          Austria     NA Austria    AT   AUT    Europe
## 3 1000-01-01          Austria     NA Austria    AT   AUT    Europe
## 4 1150-01-01          Austria     NA Austria    AT   AUT    Europe
## 5 1280-01-01          Austria     NA Austria    AT   AUT    Europe
## 6 1300-01-01          Austria     NA Austria    AT   AUT    Europe
## Variables not shown: region (chr), aggregate (lgl)
df <- subset(maddison, 
             year >= as.Date("1800-01-01") &
             iso2c %in% c("DE", "FR", "IT", "UK", "US"))

ggplot(df, aes(x = year, y = gdp_pc, color = country)) +
  geom_line() +
  scale_y_log10() +
  theme_bw() +
  labs(x = NULL, y = "GDP per capita (1990 Int. GK 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.