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Most productive countries since 1349

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Abstract

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This article first identifies the leading countries in GDP per capita for each year in the Maddison Historical Statistics Project. It then narrows the focus to apparent technology leaders since 1349, when the data identify Holland as the leader. This analysis identifies 11 different countries with the highest GDP per capita for at least one year. However, only 5 lead for more than 10 years: Holland (NLD), England / Great Britain / the United Kingdom (GBR), Australia (AUS), the United States (USA), and Singapore (SGP). Australia led for only 17 of the 39 years between 1853 and 1891 as the US was overtaking the UK as the technology leader. A plot of the leaders is then made without Australia, because its inclusion would seem to add more complexity than clarity to the message. That display is a semilog plot, because it makes a constant percentage increase look like a straight line. The resulting plot of GDP per capita suggests the Industrial Revolution began in England around 1649 when King Charles I was beheaded.

Introduction

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The Maddison Historical Statistics Project collates GDP per capita[1] and population estimates for years 1 CE to the present from all credible sources the project team finds. The MaddisonData package for R makes these data available as an R data object with companion functions to facilitate computing the leaders for each year with optional exclusions to facilitate identifying the technology leaders and with a function ggplotPath to make it relatively easy to plot and annotate the image as desired.[2] This article describes how this package was used to determine the technology leaders in GDP per capita and create a plot showing how those countries have grown over the years. It includes reproducible code in an R Markdown vignette as an appendix.

World leaders in GDP per capita

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Table 1 lists all the countries with the highest GDP per capita for at least one year in the MaddisonData.

Table 1. all the countries with the highest GDP per capita for at least one year in the MaddisonData.
country ISO year n years percent of years
begin end
Italy (ancient Rome) ITA 1 1501 3 0.2%
Iraq IRQ 730 1000 271 100%
China CHN 1090 1150 61 100%
England / Great Britain / United Kingdom GBR 1252 1898 91 14%
France FRA 1276 1374 19 19%
Spain ESP 1278 1348 50 70%
Sweden SWE 1304 1509 13 6%
Holland / Netherlands NLD 1349 1807 447 97%
Belgium BEL 1500 1500 1 100%
Australia AUS 1853 1891 17 44%
New Zealand NZL 1873 1874 2 100%
United States USA 1882 1990 58 53%
Switzerland CHE 1931 1934 4 100%
Qatar QAT 1950 2022 45 62%
Kuwait KWT 1953 1957 5 100%
United Arab Emirates ARE 1965 1984 5 25%
Luxembourg LUX 1991 1995 5 100%
Norway NOR 1996 2002 7 100%

For simplicity, we focus on the data since 1349, when Holland had the highest GDP per capita, omitting Qatar (QAT), Kuwait (KWT), United Arab Emirates (ARE), and Norway (NOR), whose wealth may be more due to petroleum than to broad technology leadership. We also delete Luxenbourg (LUX), whose population is under a million and therefore may be too small to use for general conclusions about technology leadership. Table 2 is similar to Table 1 with these adjustments.

Table 2. Highest GDP per capita among broad-based economies since 1349.
country ISO year n years percent of years
begin end
Holland / Netherlands NLD 1349 1807 447 97%
France FRA 1357 1374 7 39%
Italy ITA 1451 1501 2 4%
Sweden SWE 1468 1509 2 5%
Belgium BEL 1500 1500 1 100%
England / Great Britain / United Kingdom GBR 1808 1898 67 74%
Australia AUS 1853 1891 17 44%
New Zealand NZL 1873 1874 2 100%
United States USA 1882 2005 107 86%
Switzerland CHE 1931 2009 9 11%
Singapore SGP 2010 2022 13 100%

Singapore (SGP) has replaced Norway as the current leader, according to the Maddison project data. The Wikipedia article on "List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita"[3] notes that data from the US Central Intelligence Agency report GDP per capita numbers for Monaco (MCO) and Liechtenstein (LIE) higher than for Singapore and Norway. However, they are tiny countries with populations roughly 40,000 each and are not included in MaddisonData.

Holland (NLD) was the leader for 97 percent of the years between 1349 and 1807, according to MaddisonData. Then between 1807 and 1808, GDP per capita for NLD fell by 32 percent -- almost a third. That change can be attributed at least in part to a change in the definition of "NLD": Up to 1807, NLD represented Holland, per van Zanden and van Leeuwen (2012). Beginning in 1808, the data are for the Netherlands, per Smits et al. (2000), of which Holland is only part. Those years were also during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Netherlands were part of France for part of that period. To understand this drop better, we would need to consult experts on that history.

After that change, Holland / the Netherlands was replaced as the leader in GDP per capita by England / Great Britain / the United Kingdom (GBR), which led for 74 percent of the 91 years between 1808 and 1898. Then the US led for 84 percent of the years between 1882 and 1990 with Australia (AUS), New Zealand (NZL) and Switzerland (CHE) leading for the remaining 16 percent of those years. Luxembourg (LUX) led between 1991 and 2008, then Switzerland (CHE) led for 2009, then Singapore (SGP) between 2010 and 2022.

The next section discusses a plot of the data for NLD, GBR, USA, and SGP. Others countries are omitted, because their leadership was so short, according to these data, that including them might add more complexity than information and make it harder to understand the big picture.

Plot broad-based leaders

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Figure 1 is a semilog plot of GDP per capita for NLD, GBR, USA, and SGP between 1349 and 2022. A log scale like this makes a constant percentage increase appear as a straight line. Annotations document some of the potentially most important events during this period:

  • The orange line represents Holland through 1807 and the Netherlands starting in 1808.
  • The English Civil War (1642-1652), during which King Charles I was decapitated (1649).
  • The War of 1912 (1812-1815).
  • The American Civil War (1861-1865).
  • WW1 (1914-1918).
  • The presidency of Herbert Hoover (1929-1933).
  • The presidency of Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945).
  • WW2 (1939-1945).
  • The presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989).
  • The first presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021).
  • The presidency of Joe Biden (2021-2025).
Figure 1. World leaders in GDP per capita 1349-2022 (NLD, GBR, USA, SGP).[4]

The orange NLD line includes a drop of 32 percent between 1807 and 1808 with a change between Holland and the larger Netherlands, as mentioned above.

A key feature of a semilog plot is that a constant percentage increase appears as a straight line with the slope being proportional to the rate of growth. We see in Figure 1 that GDP per capita started increasing for England right after King Charles I lost his head. England combined with Scotland to become Great Britain by the Acts of Union of 1707 during the reign of Queen Ann, which was accompanied by economic turbulence visible in Figure 1. After she died, the economy began growing again but at a slower rate. Great Britain merged with Ireland by the Acts of Union of 1800 to become the United Kingdom (UK) during the reign of George III. The creation of the UK was quickly followed by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), which included the War of 1812, which is marked on this plot. Those wars were followed by a brief decline in the UK GDP per capita, but it quickly started growing again at a faster rate. Both World Wars had negative impacts on the UK economy, visible in Figure 1.

GDP per capita for the US started well below that of the UK, to the extent that the Maddison data are accurate, but grew faster and overtook the UK between 1882 and 1898, according to Table 2 above. The most spectacular features in Figure 1 are the unprecedented decline of the US economy during the administration of Herbert Hoover followed an even more unprecedented increase during the administration of FDR.

Fox News on the New Deal

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During the 2007-2009 Great Recession, Fox News featured numerous "experts" who claimed that FDR's New Deal made the Great Depression worse, not better. That interpretation is seriously challenged by the US line in Figure 1. An expanded discussion of these claims appears in the Wikiversity article on "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future": That discussion also includes plots of unemployment, income tax rates and inequality in income and wealth. Peck (2016), cited in that article, suggests that this propaganda campaign by Fox helped prevent the US Congress from helping the victims of the fraud, whose collapse created the Great Recession. However, the money had to be put back into the international economy to prevent the crisis from becoming much worse, and over 5,000 finance industry leaders got bonuses of over a million dollars each at taxpayer expense.[5]

During World War II, the Franklin Roosevelt administration not only taxed the ultra-wealthy like they've never been taxed before or since, they also instituted wage and price controls, which dramatically reduced price gouging by big business that had generated inflation that stifled economy growth in previous major wars like the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and World War I, also marked on Figure 1.[6]

The rate of growth in GDP per capita in the US is visibly slowing before Singapore takes the lead at the beginning of the Great Recession. Thomas Piketty, the world's leading expert on inequality, has attributed that slowing of the US economy to the increase in inequality since Reagan became US president in 1981, documented in Figures 4 and 5 of the Wikipedia article on "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future". That article includes a section on the "Role of the media", which cites research suggesting that both the increase in inequality and the slowing of the rate of economic growth can be attributed to the increased concentration of ownership of the major media including for-profit social media, which make money increasing political polarization and violence.

Industrial Revolution

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Figure 1 seems to suggest that the Industrial Revolution began in England very close to 1649 when the English chopped the head off of their King, Charles I, for abuse of power. Acemoglu and Robinson (2012, p. 102) said, "England was unique among nations when it made the breakthrough to sustained economic growth in the seventeenth century", as documented in Figure 1. Acemoglu and Johnson (2023, ch. 7) said that economic "Growth during the Middle Ages was slow and unequal ... . The rate of growth picked up after the onset of the British industrial revolution, starting around 1750", a century after the take-off visible in Figure 1. Aghion et al. (2022, p. 40) wrote, "undoubtedly the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in the 1770s ... triggered the first Industrial Revolution ... . This revolution started in England and France before spreading to other western countries, in particular the United States." But no increase in the slope of any of the lines in Figure 1 is apparent in the late 1700s.

Acemoglu and Johnson (2023) suggest that the stability of poverty and the Malthusian trap prior to the Industrial Revolution was enforced by a "society of orders" consisting of those who (1) fought, (2) prayed, and (3) worked. Those who prayed convinced those who worked to live in poverty while giving increasing shares of what they produced so those who prayed and fought could live in leisure and opulence. This seems to describe the construction of the pyramids in Egypt and the cathedrals, castles and manor homes that dot Europe today.[7]

Guttenberg's invention of moveable type contributed to the Reformation in the sixteenth century and to pamphlets and newspapers in seventeenth century England that began to compete with those who prayed in helping commoners understand their role in society. In this environment, James I fought with the English parliament, unlike his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I. James' son Charles I, similarly quarreled with the English Parliament. Those quarrels led to the English civil war, discussed above.

Some pamphlets and newspapers in that era spread the radical notions of the Levellers, insisting that governments exist with the consent of the governed and demanding "one man, one vote". The Levellers were defeated by elites led especially by Oliver Cromwell. However, that revolutionary environment encouraged enough commoners to become entrepreneurs that it had a macroeconomic impact visible in Figure 1. And Acemoglu and Robinson (2012, pp. 102-103) describe how the English Civil War (1642-1652) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the English Bill of Rights of 1689 "provided incentives for investment, trade, and innovation" while enforcing "property rights, including patents granting property rights for ideas, thereby providing a major stimulus to innovation", securing the encouragement for the entrepreneurs who contributed to the increase in the rate of growth for the UK in Figure 1 without supporting monopolies based on cronyism rather than recent inventions.

This analysis has suggested explanations for only some of the major changes visible in Figure 1. In particular, the impact of famous innovations like the Newcomen engine and James Watts' improvements are not easily identified in this image.

What's next?

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We see two different but complementary paths for future research:

  1. Fit Kalman filtering and smoothing / state space / dynamic linear models to the available data on GDP per capita and population that give separate estimates of the level and growth rates. These techniques also support interpolation to fill any gaps in the data on each country. They also support models considering other variables like the impact of changes in chief executive on the rate of growth for a given country. This could be extended to model the endogenous growth rate separate from exogenous copying from the technology leaders.
  2. Consult experts on the political economy of each country in Figure 1 to better understand the events driving changes visible there, especially for Holland / the Netherlands and for Singabore.

Appendix. Companion R Markdown vignette

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Statistical details that make the research in article reproducible are provided in an R Markdown vignette on "Most productive countries since 1349/Identifying MaddisonData leaders".

Notes

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  1. ↑ The Maddison Project collates GDP at purchasing power parity.
  2. ↑ Graves (2025).
  3. ↑ accessed 2025-01-01
  4. ↑ See Bolt and van Zanden (2024) for the Maddison Data generally, van Zanden and van Leeuwen (2012) for the data on Holland 1348–1807, Smits et al. (2000) for the data on the Netherlands 1808-1913, Broadberry et al. (2015) for the data on England 1252–1700 and on Great Britain until 1870, and Sugimoto (2011) for Singapore to 2007.
  5. ↑ Acemoglu and Johnson (2023, ch. 3).
  6. ↑ Economic growth and inflation for the four major wars in US history are summarized in Table 1 in the Wikiversity article on "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future".
  7. ↑ Acemoglu and Johnson (2023, esp. ch. 4).

Bibliography

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  • Daron Acemoğlu; Simon Johnson (2023). Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (in en). PublicAffairs. Wikidata Q125292212. ISBN 978-1-5417-0253-0. 
  • Susan B. Carter; S. S. Gartner; M. R. Haineset (2006), Historical statistics of the United States : earliest times to the present, Wikidata Q137660377
  • John J. McCusker (2006). "Colonial Statistics". Historical statistics of the United States : earliest times to the present V: 671. Wikidata Q137669937. 
  • Reece Peck (2016). "Usurping the usable past: How Fox News remembered the Great Depression during the Great Recession". Journalism 18 (6). Wikidata Q135527962. ISSN 1464-8849. 
  • R. Sutch (2006). "National Income and Product". Historical statistics of the United States : earliest times to the present III: 23-25. Wikidata Q137670038. 
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