Compare methods

	Historical National Accounting	Historical GDP Back-Projection
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1962	2001
Originator	Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole; later Angus Maddison, Robert Allen, Stephen Broadberry	Angus Maddison; with indicator methods from Robert Allen, Paolo Malanima, and Jan Luiten van Zanden
Type	descriptive-reconstruction	descriptive-extrapolation
Seminal source	Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199227204	Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199227204
Aliases	Historical GDP reconstruction, Pre-modern national accounts, Retrospective national accounting, Reconstructed historical accounts	Maddison back-projection, Indicator-based GDP estimation, Retrospective GDP extrapolation, Benchmark-and-interpolation GDP
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	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.