Σύγκριση μεθόδων

	Historical Inequality Reconstruction	Historical National Accounting
Πεδίο	Economic History	Economic History
Οικογένεια	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Έτος προέλευσης	2011	1962
Δημιουργός	Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson	Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole; later Angus Maddison, Robert Allen, Stephen Broadberry
Τύπος	Inequality estimation from grouped data	descriptive-reconstruction
Θεμελιώδης πηγή	Milanovic, B., Lindert, P. H., & Williamson, J. G. (2011). Pre-Industrial Inequality. The Economic Journal, 121(551), 255-272.	Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199227204
Εναλλακτικές ονομασίες	Social table inequality estimation, Inequality possibility frontier, Extraction ratio analysis, Milanovic-Lindert-Williamson method	Historical GDP reconstruction, Pre-modern national accounts, Retrospective national accounting, Reconstructed historical accounts
Συναφείς	4	3
Σύνοψη	Historical inequality reconstruction estimates how unequally income was distributed in pre-industrial societies that left no household surveys, by exploiting social tables—contemporary or reconstructed enumerations of social classes with their populations and average incomes, in the tradition of Gregory King's 1688 anatomy of England. Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson developed the modern framework, computing a Gini coefficient from these grouped data and then placing it in context with two further concepts. The inequality possibility frontier defines the maximum inequality a society could sustain once everyone must receive at least subsistence; because poor societies have little surplus above subsistence to redistribute upward, their feasible inequality is constrained. The extraction ratio—actual inequality divided by this maximum—measures how fully the elite extracted the available surplus. Together these tools let historians compare not just raw inequality but the rapacity of ruling classes across societies of vastly different average income.	Historical national accounting is the systematic reconstruction of a country's gross domestic product and its components for periods that predate official statistical offices. Where modern statisticians collect contemporaneous surveys, the historical accountant must assemble output from surviving fragments: tithe records, customs ledgers, probate inventories, guild accounts, harvest yields, and wage books. The method adapts the conventional output, income, and expenditure approaches of national accounting to the constraints of incomplete archival evidence, building value-added estimates sector by sector and reconciling them into an internally consistent whole. Pioneered for Britain by Deane and Cole and refined by Maddison, Allen, and the Broadberry school, it has produced annual GDP series stretching back to the medieval period. The resulting estimates anchor virtually all quantitative debate about long-run growth, the timing of the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Divergence between Europe and Asia.