Maddison‐style estimates of the evolution of the world economy: A new 2023 update

Abstract This paper surveys the literature on historical national accounting, discusses the importance of relative income benchmarks for, in particular, historical income estimates, and presents an update of long run global economic development with a new version of the Maddison Project Database (MPD). As benchmarks are central to methodologies for global income comparisons over time, and therefore vital to MPD, we analyze the consequences and biases of three benchmarks, the 1990 benchmark, the 2011 benchmark and the multiple benchmark method following the recent Penn World Tables (PWT) methodology, for pre‐1940 income estimates. We develop a methodology to determine which benchmark in combination with time…