Angus Maddison - Policy Adviser and Professorship

Policy Adviser and Professorship

In 1969-1971 Maddison worked at the Harvard University Centre for International Affairs. Maddison also held the position of policy advisor for various institutions, including the governments of Ghana and Pakistan. In addition, he visited many other countries and often directly advised the government leaders of countries such as Brazil, Guinea, Mongolia, the USSR and Japan. This enabled him to gain a unique insight into the factors that determine economic growth and prosperity.

In 1978 Maddison was appointed historical Professor at the University of Groningen. Maddison was a pioneer in the field of the construction of national accounts, where a country’s accounts are calculated back in periods of several decades all the way to the year 1. To this end he combined modern research techniques with his own extensive knowledge of economic history and in particular countries’ performances in the field of GDP per capita. His work resulted in a deep new understanding of the reasons why some countries have become rich whereas others have remained poor (or have succumbed to poverty). In this vital field, Maddison is regarded as the world’s most prominent scholar.

In the past two decades, Maddison mainly focussed on the construction of data and analysis further back in time. He had, for example, published an authoritative study on economic growth in China over the past twenty centuries. This study has strongly boosted the historical debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Europe and China as two of the world’s leading economic forces. His estimates regarding the per capita income in the Roman Empire followed up the pioneering work of Keith Hopkins and Raymond W. Goldsmith. He was also author of many important works of historical economic analysis, including The World Economy: Historical Statistics and several other reference books on the same topic.