"GDP figures - 1899" Topic

Not directly related to wargaming, I confess, but wondered if any of the great minds of TMP can point me in the direction of some GDP stats for (about) 1899? My Googlieness has let me down, somewhat. I keep coming across sites which try to put these figures into '2010 USD' or something – which is not what, alas.

I did find a very interesting xls sheet from the Bank of England which broke down actual British GDP / tax revenues (ie. using the figures of the time, not converted to allow comparison with the modern day) on a year by year basis and what these were spent on… but are there such resources for other nations?

I am particularly interested in Germany, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

Very difficult to calculate? Very little input and hold of states over a free economy, very little statistics. A lot of guesswork and transferring modern bias might make any comprehensive calculations dubious ( a la piketty ).

Look into a copy of AJP Taylor's "The Struggle for the Mastery of Europe" and you may find something close to what you want, IIRC.

Macroeconomics books look at that stuff, too.

Thanks, gents

I suppose I would ask what exactly do you want to use the figures for? The most common reason for looking at GDP is to compare relative economic power and/or growth rates, which in turn means you need to convert the various currency value estimates into a single comparable value (like Purchasing Power Parity in 1960 USD, or whatever).

Other people have done lots and lots of work on this over the decades, but you will generally find it is all converted into standard comparison units.

If you want the actual tax returns, expenditure etc in contemporary currency, then a fair degree of digging in primary sources and economic history books is going to be required.

As noted above, Thomas Piketty goes into somewhat laborious depths about the methods of historical economic analysis in his 'Capital in the Twentyfirst Century'.

Normal economics textbooks will just have the PPP/inflation adjusted type GDP comparison figures in, as that is how you work out relative growth rates over time.

For my sins, I used to be an economist.