Angus Maddison

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Angus Maddison (born December 6, 1926 in Newcastle upon Tyne , † April 24, 2010 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was a British economist and professor at the University of Groningen . His specialty was measuring and analyzing economic growth.

Live and act

Maddison attended the Grammar School in Darlington (now Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College ) from 1938 to 1944 and Selwyn College (Cambridge) from 1945 to 1948 . In 1948 and 1949 he was a Royal Air Force pilot . From 1949 he studied at the universities of McGill and Johns Hopkins . He taught at St. Andrews University for a year and then did his PhD.

In 1953 Maddison joined the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) and later became head of the economic department. In 1963, following the transformation of the Society into the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Maddison became Assistant Director of the Economic Development Department. From 1966 he worked as a freelance policy advisor. a. for the governments of Ghana and Pakistan . From 1969 to 1971 he worked at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs . In 1978 he was appointed professor of history at the University of Groningen .

Maddison was a pioneer in the field of the construction of national accounts , in which the values ​​are calculated back over decades to year 1. He combined various research techniques to determine the gross domestic product per capita of a country for the past. His work led to a better understanding of the reasons some countries got rich and others stayed poor.

He published an authoritative study of China's economic growth over the past 2,000 years, which has fueled the historical debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Europe and China as two of the world's leading economic powers. His estimates of the per capita income of the Roman Empire built on the pioneering work of Keith Hopkins and Raymond W. Goldsmith. He summarized the economic development of the whole world in The World Economy: Historical Statistics and The World Economy: A Millennium Perspective .

Maddison lived in Thourotte in northern France and always had close ties with the University of Groningen, where he was one of the main founders of the Groningen Growth and Development Center , a research group in the Faculty of Economics with a focus on long-term economic development. The databases created by Maddison and his colleagues, which now cover all countries in the world, are one of the most important sources for long-term analysis of economic growth and are used by researchers from around the world.

On his eightieth birthday, Maddison was awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau , and in 2007 he received an honorary doctorate from Hitotsubashi University in Japan . In 1996 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1994 he has been a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Angus Maddison died on April 24, 2010 in the American Hospital Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine .

Works

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Angus Maddison, Economic Historian, Dies at 83. In: The New York Times website. May 1, 2010, accessed June 15, 2014.
  2. ↑ Scheidel, Walter; Friesen, Steven J .: The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire. The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 99 (2009), pp. 61–91 (64–72)
  3. ↑ www.ggdc.net
  4. ↑ a b 113a - Royal Decoration for Angus Maddison.
  5. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 3, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Le Secrétaire général de l'OCDE déplore la mort de l'économiste Angus Maddison , OECD, 2010-04-26 (French)

Web links

Commons : Angus Maddison  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Maddison, Angus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British economist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Newcastle upon Tyne
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 2010
Place of death Neuilly-sur-Seine