GGDC News

Professor Abe de Jong has received a grant of €838.000 from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for a project titled “Collateral damage: The financial economics of slavery”.

The 8th World KLEMS Conference will be held on March 27-28, 2025 in Tokyo. This is the second World KLEMS Conference in Tokyo, with the first one held in 2014. This conference is organized by Gakushuin University, Hitotsubashi University, and Research...

On May 30,  Douglas Gollin  of Tufts and Oxford University will give the 2024 Maddison Lecture. Gollin will speak on the topic of Structural Transformation and Growth. Economists have long recognised that for a country to develop, its economy should...

The latest iteration of the Maddison Project Database, recently published in the Journal of Economic Surveys not only incorporates new time series data on GDP per capita for many countries but refined the original Maddison methodology. This makes it the...

Professors Abe de Jong and Herman de Jong received a grant of 160,000 euro for a UG ICT Innovation Fund Proposal titled Digitization of printed registries to structured data. The project’s idea is to deliver a machine learning-powered online platform to...

The Financial, Economic and Business History (FEB-HIS) Summer School for PhD students and Postdocs will take place in Groningen from Monday 24th June to Friday 28th June 2024. It is organised by the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) of the University...

The new Economic Transformation Database of Transition Economies [ETD-TE] allows for analysis of the inter-industry structural change performance of the countries of the former Soviet Union for the first time. In the period 1990-2019 - the three decades...

Comparing productivity at the sectoral level requires estimates of relatives prices at the sectoral level. The 2023 edition of the Productivity Level Database provides the most comprehensive GGDC dataset to date, covering 84 countries and 12 sectors across...

Last month GGDC director Robert Inklaar, gave an interview for the Open Science blog of the University of Groningen Library. Part of open science is that researchers make their data FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. But how to do...

We are delighted to announce the upcoming GGDC conference on Tuesday, May 28, 2024, and Wednesday, May 29, 2024. The conference will take place at a convenient location in the city centre of Groningen. In the coming months, we will be sharing further...

The Productivity Institute recently published a new blog introducing the Penn World Table (PWT). Authored by Ryan Marapin, Robert Inklaar and Reitze Gouma, this blog showcases two example analyses that illustrate the potential of the PWT data set, along...

The Council of Economic Advisers, a component of the Executive Office of the President in the Biden-Harris Administration, has released the 2023 Economic Report of the President. This report starts with a reflection by President Biden about the...

Last November 2022 the original EU KLEMS project website was taken offline. Since 2007 this website hosted the initial EU KLEMS project pages and all releases constructed between 2007 and 2018. The website has been archived in its entirety using the intern...

Hagen Kruse and Gaaitzen de Vries, together with Kei-Mu Yi and Yabo Vidogbena (both at the University of Houston), have obtained a research grant from STEG/CEPR. They will take a quantitative modelling approach to investigate the driving forces of...

We have released a minor update of the Penn World Table, version 10.01. This update changes part of the calculation of investment prices and most notably impact capital growth. Details of this change have been documented in an updated 'what is new'...

The paper “A manufacturing renaissance? Industrialization trends in the developing world” written by Hagen Kruse, Emmanuel Mensah, Kunal Sen, and Gaaitzen de Vries has been published in the IMF Economic Review.

Robert Inklaar, Daan Freeman and Erwin Diewert have won the 2021 Kendrick prize during the 37th IARIW General Conference held in August in Luxembourg. Their paper titled ‘Natural Resources and Missing Inputs in International Productivity Comparisons’ was...

On June 9th, The Economist featured research by John Fernald of INSEAD Business School and GGDC director Robert Inklaar. In their article 'The UK Productivity “Puzzle” in an International Comparative Perspective', they argue that most of Britain’s slowdown...

On May 26 The Economist featured an article on China's attempts to mitigate its exposure to Western influence, using data from the Penn World Table version 10.0.

The paper "Jobs and Productivity Growth in Global Value Chains: New Evidence for Twenty-five Low- and Middle-Income Countries", written by Stefan Pahl, Marcel Timmer, Reitze Gouma, and Pieter Woltjer, has been accepted for publication in the The World Bank...

Jutta Bolt has been awarded a Wallenberg Academy Fellows prolongation grant for five years to investigate historical disease patterns in Africa. The current pandemic is a forceful reminder of the global importance of good health for all. But at the same...

As part of Marcel Timmer's VICI-project, a long-run time series of World Input-Output Tables for the period 1965-2000 has been constructed.

The original website of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), previously hosted at www.wiod.org, has been migrated to the GGDC website. An archived version of the original website is still available, but will no longer be updated. All information and...

The fourteenth conference of the European Historical Economics Society (EHES) will be held at the University of Groningen, Friday - Saturday, 17-18 June 2022.

Deadline for proposal submissions is 31 January 2022. United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) is requesting research proposals on the Economic Transformation Database (ETD) project. This project aims to...

The Asian Development bank (ADB), Research institute for Global Value Chains at the university of international business and economics (RI GVC), the World trade organization (WTO), the institute of Developing economies – Japan external trade organization...

Herman de Jong received a large NWO-OC grant funding a project to investigate the function of the Amsterdam stock exchange during the period 1870-1940. The aim of this project is to probe the stock exchange’s contribution to corporate finance and economic...

Last week, the IMF Economic Review published a new paper by GGDC researchers Marcel Timmer, Bart Los and Gaaitzen de Vries, co-authored with wiiw's Robert Stehrer. The paper proposes a new way to account for changes in the global trade elasticity, the...

On March 20th, The Economist featured research by the GGDC and UNU-WIDER on the manufacturing renaissance in Africa. A key finding is that the share of people working in manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa has risen from 7.2% of the total in 2010 to 8.4%....

Today, the Economic Transformation Database has been released. This database has been developed by the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, supported by UNU-WIDER. The database provides information on output and employment for 12 sectors of the economy...

Regrettably, the GGDC conference that was scheduled for 16-18 June 2021 has been cancelled. It has been cancelled, because it is unlikely that the conference can be held on site. Much of the goals and opportunities to meet and interact are therefore not...

Today, we have launched version 10.0 of the Penn World Table. This version of the database covers 183 countries and the years from 1950 to 2019. We have incorporated the latest data from the International Comparison Program, led by the World Bank, which...

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar are both in the Dutch Economists Top 40, compiled annually by the journal ESB, on places 35 and 39. On the separate list of highest scoring economists in 2019, Robert Inklaar comes in at third place. The main ranking is...

Jutta Bolt has just been appointed to one of the University of Groningen's Aletta Jacobs chairs. These chairs were created to give female associate professors a leg up, to achieve a less male-dominated professoriat. As GGDC, we heartily congratulate Jutta...

In early December, several media outlets paid attention to a report written by Bart Los and Jouke van Dijk (UG, Faculty of Spatial Sciences), about the employment impact of the large NortH2 hydrogen project for the North of the Netherlands in general and...

Bart Los and Marcel Timmer are amongst the world's most influential researchers, as they have authored several papers that are amongst the most highly-cited in recent years. Check out the full list.

Following the appointment of Bart van Ark as director of the new Productivity Institute, he has been appointed as honorary professor at FEB to emphasise his continued engagement with the University of Groningen, see here for more details.

Jutta Bolt and Leigh Gardner published a paper in the Journal of Economic History on the role played by Africans in shaping British colonial institutions in Africa. The paper presents new data on local governments, or “Native Authorities,” to present the...

A new version of the Maddison Project Database has been released this week. This new version includes all available recent work by economic historians on long term economic growth and extends the income series for all countries until 2018. The 2020 update...

On September 10 and 11, you can join a workshop that is part of the STEG project and organised by Robert Inklaar and Akos Valentinyi. The workshop will focus on how improved data or economic measurement can help shed a light on the process of structural...

On September 1, Robert Inklaar has taken over as director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) from Marcel Timmer.

The UK ESRC is funding a new Productivity Institute, which will be based at the Alliance Manchester Business School and led by Bart van Ark, who was director of the GGDC for a long time and who remains affiliated with the GGDC and the University of...

Bart Los and Xianjia Ye published an article in ESB, the major Dutch magazine on economic policy. They provide indicators for the economic importance of Italy and Spain for the Dutch and German economies. Using methods for bilateral dependencies in...

Herman de Jong received a large grant for building a new Dutch database holding Dutch corporate and stock exchange data for the period 1796-1980. The grant is awarded by the KNAW (Royal Dutch Academy of Science) in cooperation with digital infrastructures...

Herman de Jong and Daniel Gallardo published a paper in the European Review on Economic History on the evolution of English living standards during the early phase of industrialization (1760-1850). The paper takes a multi-dimensional perspective and...

Together with UG-colleagues Thijs Broekhuizen, Sierdjan Koster and Arjen Edzes and several experts from non-academic circles, Bart Los wrote the first edition of De Staat van de Noord-Nederlandse Economie (The State of the Economy of the Northern...

For low-income countries to develop, their economies need to transform from rural and agricultural to urban and industrialised. In many sub-Saharan countries, urbanization to date has outpaced industrialization and structural change has largely been from...

It is with great sadness that we received news on the passing away of our good friend and colleague Eddy (Adam) Szirmai. Eddy was one the co-founders of the GGDC in 1994. He has been crucial in bringing together a group of dedicated scholars on the topic...

The GGDC organizes a conference on June 15–17 2020 in Groningen, on the themes central to GGDC, namely long-run economic development, trade and technology. The conference will feature keynote speeches by Carol Graham (Brookings, Maryland), Branko Milanovic...

Branko Milanovic has been appointed as the third holder of the Maddison Chair. In this role, he will be affiliated with the University of Groningen and regularly visit for research and teaching activities.

A team of researchers at FEB’s Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) received US$223k from UNU WIDER for a multi-year research project on structural change in developing countries. The United Nations University World Institute for Development...

On June 4, Bart Los gave a seminar at the London office of the Office for National Statistics. It was a seminar in the series organized by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, an initiative to which Marcel Timmer and Bart contributed. Bart's talk...

In a recently published paper in the Review of World Economics, Stefan Pahl and Marcel Timmer document a new set of stylized facts on vertical specialisation since 1970. They construct new data to estimate the domestic value-added content in exports (VAX-D...

Marcel Timmer, director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre will be appointed as one of the three board members of the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis, CPB, starting September 1, 2019. In this position, he will jointly lead the...

Today, version 9.1 of the Penn World Table has been released. The data can be downloaded from this page. This new version has the following features, described in more detail here:

Over the past few months, GGDC-researcher Bart Los has contributed a bi-weekly column about Brexit to the website of Groningen's regional public broadcaster RTV Noord. The columns focus on various potential impacts of Brexit on the Northern provinces of...

On February 7, the New York Times published an article on regional implications of Brexit. It featured a map on regional economic Brexit risks in Europe, taken from the Papers in Regional Science article from 2018, co-authored by GGDC-members Wen Chen and...

As many of you have noticed and noted, we have not managed to meet our goal for publishing PWT 9.1 in late 2018. Providing a high-quality data release that meets the ambitions set out last summer, especially with regard to improved capital measurement. We...

Peter IJtsma, Bart Los and Marcel Timmer, joint with Peter Levell (IFS), published a paper in Fiscal Studies on the degree to which the UK participates in global value chains and what this implies for a post-Brexit trade policy. They argue that the UK will...

Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries, together with the OECD's Sébastien Miroudot, have published a paper in the Journal of Economic Geography on functional specialization in trade. They propose a new measure that describes in what type of activities a...

The Socio-Economic Council of the Northern Netherlands, SER-NN, organized a meeting on November 26 about the possible impact of Brexit on three Northern provinces of The Netherlands. Bart Los gave a talk and participated in a panel with representatives...

On November 15, Bart Los received the award for the best paper in the 2017 volume of the journal Regional Studies. He had co-authored the winning paper, The Mismatch between Local Voting and the Local Economic Consequences of Brexit, with Philip McCann...

Today, the Financial Times reports on new research by Jonathan Eaton (U. of Pennsylvania) and Samuel Kortum (Yale) using data from the World Input Output Database. Eaton and Kortum find that trade volumes in services is heavily affected by distance. So if,...

In an article in the (Dutch) Volkskrant, Marcel Timmer is interviewed on the consequences of the trade negotiations between the NAFTA countries, the United States, Mexico and Canada. He argues that the inter-connected nature of trade and production means...

In research published in the Journal of Development Economics, Laurie Reijnders and Gaaitzen de Vries analyse the worldwide increase in the share of non-routine jobs. They find that, in particular, technology has led to a global increase in this share,...

Marcel Timmer has been named this year's Outstanding Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Economics and Business by the SOM Research Institute. This designation honours Marcel's path-breaking research, as evidenced by a large volume of high-impact studies,...

At the latest conference of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA), Bart Los, together with Phillip McCann, Raquel Ortega-Argilés and Frank van Oort, organised a session on Brexit. The presentations focused on (e.g.) the regional disparities of...

At the latest General Conference of the International Association of Research in Income and Wealth, GGDC researchers contributed substantially to the program:

New research by Herman de Jong and María Gómez León, published in the Economic History Review, examines inequality in Germany and the United Kingdom in the first half of the twentieth century. Over this period, the developments have mirrored each other in...

Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer published a paper in the AEA Papers and Proceedings on using online prices for comparisons of real consumption levels across countries (open access version here), jointly with Alberto Cavallo (HBS), Erwin Diewert (UBC) and ...

Work on a new version of the Penn World Table (PWT) is progressing and has advanced to the point where we can provide more information on the timing and content of this new release:

Marcel Timmer is interviewed by the Dutch newspaper NRC on the effects of import tariffs on cars. These have been threatened by Trump and would aim to shift car production to the United States. Such tariffs would hurt Americans by making cars more...

Marcel Timmer, Robert Inklaar and Jop Woltjer were amongst the presenters at the Fifth World KLEMS conference, organised by Dale Jorgenson and others at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on June 4–5. Presentations included discussion of the...

On May 23, Thomas Piketty gave the Maddison lecture, on the topic of globalization and inequality. See here for some highlights and how Piketty's work relates to research of GGDC.

In the IMF's latest World Economic Outlook, its chapter 3 on manufacturing jobs relies heavily on data provided by the GGDC, including the World Input-Output Database and the GGDC Productivity Level Database, as well as relying on the data from the World...

Today, Bart Los will present new research jointly with Marcel Timmer on Measuring Bilateral Exports of Value Added at a conference organised by the NBER and CRIW on the Challenges of Globalization in the Measurement of National Accounts, which brings...

On March 6, Robert Inklaar gave his inaugural lecture to officially accept his position of Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare. In this lecture, he established how productivity growth in the 21st century has been low by historical...

On March 2, Bart Los gave a seminar at the European Commission, Directorate General of Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) on the usefulness of the World Input-Output Database for tracking European competitiveness in a world characterised by global...

Today the GGDC released the Socio-Economic Accounts (SEA), part of the WIOD 2016 release.

A new column on VoxEU is online, discussing the new version of the Maddison Project Database, which was released two weeks ago. The key innovation is to distinguish two series for real GDP per capita, one best suited for comparing income levels across...

A recent report on the importance of trading links with Europe for the Scottish economy emphasises the importance of taking a global value chain perspective to analysing this topic. The report relies on the WIOD database to make these arguments.

A new version of the Maddison Project Database has been released today. This new version introduces a new measure of real GDP per capita that is based on both modern and historical comparisons of income levels, leading to a 'multiple benchmark' measure...

The annual top-40 of economists and business researchers in the Netherlands features both Marcel Timmer (24) and Robert Inklaar (32). This ranking, produced by the journal Economische and Statistische Berichten, is based on each researcher's 15 best...

The recent research by Wen Chen, Bart Los and others about how different regions in the UK and in Europe could be affected by Brexit has attracted substantial media attention, from The Guardian, the New Statesman, the Evening Standard, Metro, The...

How important is the trade relationship between the Netherlands and United States for American jobs? In a recent tweet, the Dutch Embassy in Washington DC claims that 740 000 American jobs depend on economies ties with the Netherlands: due to exports from...

In a new paper in Papers in Regional Science and a column on VoxEU, Bart Los and Wen Chen – together with Phil McCann, Raquel Ortega-Argilés, Mark Thissen and Frank van Oort – show how the impact of Brexit on labour income varies across the different...

Where the UK government was not able to come up with a clear estimate of the impact of Brexit across sectors, Bart Los and Wen Chen, collaborating with Philip McCann (Sheffield) and Raquel Ortega-Argilés (Birmingham) have done so in a new policy briefing....

The WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) just released its biannual yearbook in a public launching event. This year's topic is "Intangible Capital in Global Value Chains"; the WIPO report  can be downloaded here. The underlying report, written...

Phillip McCann (Sheffield) will today present joint research with Bart Los at a conference that is organized as part of The UK in a Changing Europe initiative. The presentation focuses on the regional exposure to Brexit of regions in the UK and in Europe, ...

Gaaitzen de Vries presented recent work with Sébastien Miroudot and Marcel Timmer on functional specialization in international trade at an UNCTAD expert meeting on October 26. The meeting included contributions from the minister of industry and...

The research of Marianna Papakonstantinou is featured in Trouw (in Dutch): she finds that countries with greater emigration subsequently experience faster growth in knowledge-intensive industries. This implies that factors such as return migration,...

Bart Los presents today at a workshop organised by IVIE in Valencia on the World Input Output Database and the research on 'peak trade', based on the paper An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release.

Bart Los presented at the European Regional Science Association Congress held in the last week of August, in Groningen. Bart presented recent work on the "GDP exposure to Brexit" of regions on both sides of the Channel. The study, co-authored by Wen Chen...

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar each organised a session at the 4th annual conference of the Society for Economic Measurement, at MIT, from July 26 to 28. The session by Marcel Timmer was on trade and global value chains and included presentations by Robe...

On July 1, Robert Inklaar was appointed Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare at the University of Groningen. The main research objective of this new chair is to better understand how automation will affect not just economic activity, but...

Gaaitzen de Vries has been appointed special term Research Professor of Global Value Chains at the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing. The centre in which he participates is dedicated to research activities on the development of...

Marcel Timmer presents on 'International Production Fragmentation and the Global Trade Slowdown' at a conference at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Other presenters include Sam Kortum, Stephen Yeaple and Costas Arkolakis. This...

On the (Dutch) Kennislink website, Robert Inklaar discusses how the spread of robots is a challenge for those with jobs involving routine tasks, yet embracing robots may be preferable to jobs disappearing overseas.

Robert Inklaar presented joint work with Jutta Bolt, Jan Luiten van Zanden and Herman de Jong at the International Comparison Conference in Princeton on May 25. The presentation reported on progress towards a new version of the Maddison Project Database on...

Global trade is no longer expanding as it used to, in part because Chinese consumption is shifting towards services produced at home (see the underlying paper). The Financieel Dagblad discusses this research in an article about Dutch exports to Germany....

Marcel Timmer and Bart Los are contributors to two of the 25 winning consortia that will conduct research on the consequences of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union for the British ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council). Timmer will...

The Transatlantic Platform has awarded a Digging into Data grant of €375,000 to an international team of researchers, with the team for the Netherlands led by Robert Inklaar and also including Marcel Timmer. The grant is awarded for a project to use online...

The Reformatorisch Dagblad reported last Saturday about the stagnating growth of world trade, interviewing Marcel Timmer about the drivers and consequences of this development. For the research by Timmer and other about the drivers of the global trade...

Bart Los is presenting today at the Eurostat conference on New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics 2017 on how the research on global value chains has used existing data and how official statistics could be improved to shed better light on...

Wen Chen, Reitze Gouma and Marcel Timmer have prepared two reports as background for the upcoming World Intellectual Property Report 2017. The reports aim to measure the importance of intangible assets in global value chains. They were presented on March...

Jutta Bolt is presenting today in the Economic History Seminar at the London School of Economics (LSE) on project, jointly with PhD student Prince Young Aboagye on "Doing well while doing good? Long-term trends in income inequality in Ghana 1895-2015".

Marcel Timmer today presents new research, jointly by Wen Chen and Bart Los, on measuring the returns to intangible capital in global value chains at a conference of the NBER's Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) on Measuring and Accounting...

Today, Gaaitzen de Vries will give a lecture in the World Trade Organization's Trade Dialogues Lectures. His contribution to this series, which has seen earlier contributions by David Dorn (U. of Zürich), Eric Verhoogen (Columbia) and others, focuses on...

Alan Heston, one of the original forces behind the International Comparison Program (ICP) and the Penn World Table has drafted a memoir of these major undertakings, which have transformed international economic statistics over the past half century. We...

In an interview with the (Dutch) Financieel Dagblad, Marcel Timmer argues that the current era of production fragmentation makes it less likely that a trade war will flare up: "Lobbying for protection from foreign competition only makes sense if a...

On January 13, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) held a workshop on the opportunities for research using linked employer-employee data (LEED). This workshop was co-organized by Gaaitzen de Vries. One of the strengths of LEED is that it is possible to track...

Leandro Prados de la Escosura, who holds the Maddison Chair in Groningen, has just published a VOX column discussing his recent project, in which he has reconstructed the National Accounts for Spain back to 1850, i.e. some 100 years before official...

Robert Inklaar lectures today at the European Investment Bank about Inequality and GDP. He will argue that our understanding of income differences across countries depends crucially on accurate and frequent comparisons of prices across countries as...

Jutta Bolt has been named as one of the 29 new Wallenberg Academy Fellows for 2016. This prestigious Swedish research grant by the Wallenberg Foundation of approximately €1mln will allow Jutta Bolt to devote more time to her research, in part at Lund...

Gaaitzen de Vries spoke last Monday at the World Bank conference on 'Making Global Value Chains work for Development'. This conference brought together experts discussing the measurement, trends and determinants of global value chains. Gaaitzen talked...

On June 28–30, we organise a conference to celebrate the 25 year anniversary of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) in Het Kasteel in Groningen. The conference will feature many prominent speakers: Dale Jorgenson (Harvard) will give an...

NRC, a Dutch daily newspaper, has just published an interview with Marcel Timmer centred around the report on peak trade, An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release. The title of the article is telling: "The politician who aims...

VoxEU now also has a column on the recent report on peak trade, An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release.

Marcel Timmer is due to speak at the Fourth IMF Statistical Forum, "Lifting the small boats: statistics for inclusive growth". This forum addresses current challenges faced by statisticians in capturing globalization, inequality, financial inclusion, and...

The (Dutch) Financieel Dagblad reports on new GGDC research: An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release. This paper is based on the newly released WIOD data and analyses why global trade has not grown as rapidly since 2008 as...

A new version of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) has been released. Important features are the coverage of a more recent period, 2000–2014, more extensive data for 43 countries (rather than 40) and 56 sectors (rather than 35), and a switch to the...

Bart Los presents at the OECD's 31st Meeting of the Working Party on Territorial Indicators on new indicators of participation in global value chains at the regional level. These are based on regionally disaggregated World Input Output Tables that have...

This upcoming Saturday, November 5, we welcome top economist Daron Acemoglu (MIT) to Groningen for the next Maddison lecture, on The Race of Man against Machine. In this public lecture, jointly organised with In the LEAD, we are looking forward to hearing...

Laurie Reijnders, Marcel Timmer and Xianjia Ye have written a column for VOX EU based on their most recent research. They argue that the perspective of global value chains allows one to distinguish bias in technical change from the effects of offshoring....

Marcel Timmer, Joost Veenstra and Pieter Woltjer have published in the Journal of Economic History. Their paper, titled "The Yankees of Europe? A New View on Technology and Productivity in German Manufacturing in the Early Twentieth Century" studies why...

Bart Los, Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries have published in the  American Economic Review . Their article is title "Tracing Value-Added and Double Counting in Gross Exports: Comment" and they propose a method that provides a clear definition of...

Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong and Reitze Gouma have published a note in the Journal of Economic History. In this paper, titled "A Note on Technology Shocks and the Great Depression", they argue that their own earlier work and a more recent contribution by...

Marcel Timmer gave a keynote lecture on this topic at a conference organised by the Bank of Lithuania, which also included speakers such as Richard Baldwin, Fabio Ghironi, and Laura Alfaro. The presented research, jointly by Timmer, Bart Los, Gaaitzen de...

The New York Times Magazine picked up research by Bart Los, Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries: "Last year, economists at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, said that by their very rough estimates total foreign demand for Chinese goods may...

GGDC researchers played several important roles at the recent General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW), in Dresden. This biennial conference brings together academic researchers and official...

Thanks to helpful user queries, we have found two computation errors in the PWT 9.0 data that were released on June 9 2016:

The Economist uses data from the Penn World Table to illustrate how Vietnam's growth in GDP per capita over de past quarter century matches China's growth experience following its liberalizing reforms in the late 1970s.

On Saturday November 5, from 11:00–13:00, Daron Acemoglu of MIT will give the next Maddison lecture. Details to follow.

The GGDC Summer School 2016 took place between July 11 and 15 and featured several lectures by Branko Milanović, on inequality and the role of globalisation, as well as lectures by other renowned scholars. Around 25 students from all over the world...

On June 30, Wen Chen successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Intangible capital and economic growth. He continues his research career in Groningen as a postdoc on Marcel Timmer's Vici project.

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar presented their research at the 2016 conference of the Society for Economic Measurement. Marcel Timmer presented a framework for measuring productivity when production is fragmented across borders and prices are imperfectly...

Bart Los and Erik Dietzenbacher are teaching a module on Structural Decomposition Analysis as part of the International School of Input-Output Analysis on Monday July 4, ahead of the International Input-Output Conference in Seoul, Korea.

The Guardian has written about the report by Bart Los and others on regional support for Brexit and dependence on the EU.

Ahead of Britain's referendum on EU membership, Bart Los has co-authored a study with Philip McCann, John Springford, and Mark Thissen. 

A new version of the Penn World Table, 9.0, has been released and is available here.

Can we still classify an entire industry as technology intensive? At a workshop of the US National Science Foundation, Bart Los argued that this is an outdated perspective in a time when electronics manufacturing in one country may involve the development...

Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer presented at a conference at MIT on International Comparisons of Income, Prices, and Production, on the upcoming update to version 9 of the Penn World Table. Participants included Nobel laureate Angus Deaton (Princeton),...

Gaaitzen de Vries, Abdul Azeez Erumban and Marcel Timmer presented at the fourth World KLEMS conference in Madrid on May 23 and 24 on issues of productivity and global value chains

Robert Inklaar has won the WF Duisenberg Fellowship Prize, awarded every two years to the best young applied macroeconomist in the Netherlands. The jury praised his publication record and contribution to policy debates. On receiving the prize, he discussed...

ABC espana, amongst other Spanish media, covered the main highlights of the fourth World KLEMS conference. This conference was organised by IVIE in cooperation with Harvard University and the GGDC.

Marcel Timmer discusses in an interview in Het Financieel Dagblad (in Dutch) how improved data collection and analysis leads to greater insights in the export performance of countries. Important insights relate to the interconnectedness of manufacturing...

Marcel Timmer was an advisor to the temporary committee of the Dutch Parliament (Tweede Kamer) on the measurement of welfare. The report of commission, titled "Welvaart in Kaart" (Mapping Welfare), is available here.

A recent study, by CEPR and LSE, shows that if Britain leaves the European Union, the costs in terms of lower living standards would be substantial. The economic model that was used relies on the data of the World Input-Output Database.

Global trade has grown faster than global GDP for decades, but this pattern has recently reversed. Accounting for this slowdown is the aim of new research by that is presented today at a conference on "Productivity and External Balancing", jointly...

The answer is 'no', as shown in a paper by Robert Inklaar and Prasada Rao (University of Queensland) that has just been accepted by the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, which ranks in the top ten of economics journals.

Today's Financieel Dagblad (Dutch only) writes about the recent report on Dutch competitiveness by Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries. The article and report discuss how services industries in the Netherlands add a growing share of the value of exports...

On Wednesday January 20, VNO-NCW and MKB-Nederland have organized 'De dag van de Industrie 2016' (the day of industry 2016) at the Nieuwspoort in the Hague. During that day, Gaaitzen de Vries will present the main outcomes from a report he and Marcel...

We were very happy that a committee of esteemed colleagues recognized the usefulness of our research and database development efforts in the national Research Review of the faculty's research school, SOM. This helped contribute to the faculty's research...

This summer, from July 11-15, the GGDC organizes a Summer School on the topic of Globalization and Inequality. Lecturers include Branko Milanović, Remco Oostendorp and Leandro Prados de la Escosura. The Summer School is intended for PhD students, research...

Gaaitzen de Vries will present today at the Asian Develoment Bank's 'Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2016 Conference' on the topic of global value chains and job dynamics. This three-day conference has a number of other notable speakers, such as...

In an article for the Dutch magazine Economisch Statistische berichten, Marcel Timmer outlines future research on global value chains. In some first results, he shows that international outsourcing has considerably smaller effects on employment than...

Productivity gains from a more efficient allocation of capital and labor across firms are large. However, a recent study of manufacturing firms in low- and middle-income countries by Robert Inklaar, Addisu Lashitew and Marcel Timmer, finds that the gains...

The results of some recent studies suggests that organization capital – what firms knows about their assets and how they can best be used – could be a source of productivity spillovers. The recent paper by Wen Chen and Robert Inklaar, forthcoming in the...

A recent discussion on VoxEU about trends in world GDP illustrates how the wider use of Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) would lead to figures that are more readily plausible and easier to interpret.

Herman de Jong and Marcel Timmer contributed to the KVS Preadviezen “De match tussen mens en machine” [The match between man and machine], edited by Bas ter Weel. They presented their contributions at the Behandeling van de KVS Preadviezen in The Hague.

Marcel Timmer participated in a round table discussion on 'Future Trends in the Economics of Growth', where he talked about the need for more work on growth of welfare, rather than GDP; see his presentation. The round table was hosted by Mark Sanders of...

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert meeting on the Dutch economy in Global Value Chains organized by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the recent report by De Vries and Timmer on the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for...

Gauging the strength of the Netherlands of a trading nation and analysing where it specialises should use data on trade in value added, rather than the traditional gross trade statistics. Well-known to experts, but Marcel Timmer's research in the...

The next version of the Penn World Table, version 9.0, is currently under development with numerous changes. There is no firm release date at this point, other than 'as soon as possible'. Our best estimate at this point will be a release in the first...

While advanced economies grew rich from specialising in manufacturing and employing a large share of the labor force in this sector, the research of Dani Rodrik suggests that path is no longer available to lower-income economies today. How does he know...

A paper by Robert Inklaar and Erwin Diewert on "Measuring industry productivity and cross-country convergence" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Econometrics, in a special issue on economic measurement. The paper finds that cross-country...

Gaaitzen de Vries and Marcel Timmer finished a report for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairsand VNO/NCW titled: “Dutch Manufacturing Competing in Global Value Chains”. The report stresses the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for the...

Reitze Gouma gave a presentation on the occasion of the launch of the FAO's new agricultural productivity database, indicating how incorporating measurement lessons from EU KLEMS would be beneficial.

The paper ‘Long term trends in economic inequality: Lessons from colonial Botswana 1921–1974’ written by Jutta Bolt and Ellen Hillbom (Lund University) has been accepted for publication in the Economic History Review. The show a rise and subsequent decline...

Gaaitzen de Vries completed a consultancy report on ‘Global Value Chain Specialization Patterns of Sweden and Its Key Competitors’ for Tillväxtanalys (Stockholm, Sweden). The analysis shows that Austria and the Netherlands are emerging as key competitors...

Robert Inklaar presented research-in-progress with Jutta Bolt at a World Bank meeting. The main question is whether the World Bank's approach to measuring global poverty does adequate justice to cross-country differences and whether a new method for...

El Pais reports on the changing structure of world trade using data from the World Input-Output Database (in Spanish).

Gaaitzen de Vries published new research with Benno Ferrarini of the Asian Development Bank where they account for the growth of carbon dioxide emissions due to changes in consumption, technology and global supply chain trade, see here. While emerging...

A paper co-authored by Robert Feenstra from UC Davis, Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer has appeared in the October issue of the American Economic Review. The paper details the new version of the widely-used Penn World Table, how this database can best be...

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert seminar organised by the European Commission's DG EMPL and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on structural change.

The paper "Tracing Value-Added and Double Counting in Gross Exports: Comment" (login required), written by Bart Los, Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries will appear in the American Economic Review. They provide a much simpler and more intuitive method for...

The VICI project "Modelling Global Value Chains, a new framework to study trade, jobs and income inequality in an interdependent world" has started. This 5-year project involving a team of PhD students and post docs is led by Marcel Timmer and funded by...

Four new hires will strengthen the GGDC: PhD students Stefan Pahl and Aobo Jiang, and post docs Laurie Reijnders and Wen Chen.