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Angus Maddison (6 December 1926 – 24 April 2010) was a British economist specialising in quantitative macro economic history, including the measurement and analysis of economic growth and development.
Maddison lectured at several universities over the course of his career, including the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Harvard University. In 1978, Maddison was appointed Historical Professor in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Groningen (RUG). He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus Professor.
Maddison is particularly known for documenting economic performance over long periods of time and across major countries in every continent of the world.
In 1953, Maddison joined the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), and afterwards became Head of the OEEC Economics Division. In 1963, after the OEEC became the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Maddison became Assistant Director of the Economic Development Department. In 1966–71 he took leave of absence and spent the next 15 years in a series of consulting appointments during which he returned to the OECD for four years.
In 1978, Maddison was appointed historical Professor at the University of Groningen. Maddison was a pioneer in the field of the construction of national accounts, where a country's accounts are calculated back in periods of several decades all the way to the year 1. To this end he combined modern research techniques with his own extensive knowledge of economic history and in particular countries' performances in the field of GDP per capita. His work resulted in a deep new understanding of the reasons why some countries have become rich whereas others have remained poor (or have succumbed to poverty). In this field, Maddison was regarded as the world's most prominent scholar. Maddison's GDP reconstructions have been criticized.
In the past two decades, Maddison mainly focussed on the construction of data and analysis further back in time. For example, he published an authoritative study on economic growth in China over the past twenty centuries. This study has strongly boosted the historical debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Europe and China as two of the world's leading economic forces. His estimates regarding the per capita income in the Roman Empire followed up the pioneering work of Keith Hopkins and Raymond W. Goldsmith. He was also author of many works of historical economic analysis, including and several other reference books on the same topic.
Maddison received a royal decoration as Commander in the Netherlands Order of Orange Nassau as he turned 80, 113a – Royal Decoration for Angus Maddison and in October 2007 Maddison received an honorary doctorate at Hitotsubashi University, Japan.
Maddison died on Saturday, 24 April 2010, at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Le Secrétaire général de l'OCDE déplore la mort de l'économiste Angus Maddison, OECD, 26 April 2010 (French) After his death Maddison's exhaustive work quantifying global economic history has been praised as pioneering and important.
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