Economic history has lost two giants in the past month: first François Crouzet, and now Angus Maddison. Maddison was a larger than life character and a committed Hibernophile who will be impossible to replace. Both men will be greatly missed.
Economic history has lost two giants in the past month: first François Crouzet, and now Angus Maddison. Maddison was a larger than life character and a committed Hibernophile who will be impossible to replace. Both men will be greatly missed.
4 replies on “Death of Angus Maddison”
RIP
“Progress in the study of economic growth
As Dale Jorgenson has emphasised, the work that transformed debate on research into sources of international economic growth was the publication, in the early 1980s, of Maddison’s Phases of Capitalist Development followed by his Dynamic Forces of Capitalist Development.
These works confronted the fundamental statistical problem that in the Kuznets/Solow approach ‘technology’ was defined as a residual. Maddison synthesised the work of himself and others on economic growth, using the the much more advanced econometric tools that were then available, and showed that most of the [Solow] residual had indeed been ‘a measure of our ignorance’ and not technology. Maddison’s key findings for the post-World War II period are set out in Table 1 and 2.”
Full article, placing Madison’s achievements in the context of the development of modern economic theory can be found here
http://socialisteconomicbulletin.blogspot.com/2009/09/asian-and-chinese-economic-growth.html
I used the adjective “eminent” last week in reference to Angus Maddison, in an article on Asia, before I had learned of his death.
His work on Asian economic history is magisterial.
Globalisation and Asia’s return to economic supremacy:
http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1019524.shtml
Sad.