Methoden vergleichen

	Cliometric Counterfactual Analysis	Historical GDP Back-Projection
Fachgebiet	Economic History	Economic History
Familie	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Entstehungsjahr	1964	2001
Urheber	Robert W. Fogel; Stanley L. Engerman	Angus Maddison; with indicator methods from Robert Allen, Paolo Malanima, and Jan Luiten van Zanden
Typ	Counterfactual econometric reasoning over historical economic outcomes	descriptive-extrapolation
Wegweisende Quelle	Fogel, R. W. (1964). Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History. Johns Hopkins Press. ISBN: 9780801805547	Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199227204
Aliasnamen	New Economic History, Counterfactual Cliometrics, Fogelian Counterfactual Analysis, Social Saving Method	Maddison back-projection, Indicator-based GDP estimation, Retrospective GDP extrapolation, Benchmark-and-interpolation GDP
Verwandt	3	3
Zusammenfassung	Cliometric counterfactual analysis is the signature technique of the 'new economic history' pioneered by Robert Fogel: it tests claims about the historical importance of an innovation, institution, or event by constructing an explicit, quantified hypothetical economy in which that factor is absent and measuring how much worse off the counterfactual world would have been. Fogel's 1964 study of American railroads asked not whether railroads mattered but how much, building a hypothetical 1890 economy served by canals and wagons and computing the 'social saving' railroads provided. The shockingly small figure overturned the consensus that railroads were indispensable to American growth, and Fogel and Engerman extended the same explicit, theory-driven, measurement-heavy reasoning to slavery in Time on the Cross. The method fuses neoclassical economic theory, formal counterfactuals, and aggressive quantification of the archival record.	Historical GDP back-projection estimates long-run income for periods too thinly documented for full national accounting. Rather than rebuilding sectoral value-added year by year, it anchors to a handful of relatively secure benchmark estimates and fills the gaps between and before them using indirect indicators that move with income, chiefly the share of population living in towns, real wages of building labourers, agricultural productivity, and population density. The logic, associated above all with Angus Maddison and developed further by Allen, Malanima, and van Zanden, is that these indicators bear a stable, theoretically grounded relationship to per-capita output, so their movements can proxy GDP growth where direct measurement is impossible. The method has produced the multi-century per-capita income series that frame debates about pre-modern stagnation, Malthusian dynamics, and the European Little Divergence, while remaining explicitly more uncertain than bottom-up accounts.