Compare methods

	Cliometric Counterfactual Analysis	Historical National Accounting
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1964	1962
Originator	Robert W. Fogel; Stanley L. Engerman	Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole; later Angus Maddison, Robert Allen, Stephen Broadberry
Type	Counterfactual econometric reasoning over historical economic outcomes	descriptive-reconstruction
Seminal source	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
Aliases	New Economic History, Counterfactual Cliometrics, Fogelian Counterfactual Analysis, Social Saving Method	Historical GDP reconstruction, Pre-modern national accounts, Retrospective national accounting, Reconstructed historical accounts
Related	3	3
Summary	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 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.