Abstract. Gross domestic product (GDP) represents a widely used metric to compare
economic development across time and space. GDP estimates have been routinely
assembled only since the beginning of the second half of the 20th century,
making comparisons with prior periods cumbersome or even impossible. In
recent years various efforts have been put forward to re-estimate national
GDP for specific years in the past centuries and even millennia, providing
new insights into past economic development on a snapshot basis. In order to
make this wealth of data utilizable across research disciplines, we here
present a first continuous and consistent data set of GDP time series for 195
countries from 1850 to 2009, based mainly on data from the Maddison Project
and other population and GDP sources. The GDP data are consistent with Penn
World Tables v8.1 and future GDP projections from the Shared Socio-economic
Pathways (SSPs), and are freely available at
http://doi.org/10.5880/pik.2018.010 (Geiger and Frieler, 2018). To ease
usability, we additionally provide GDP per capita data and further
supplementary and data description files in the online archive. We utilize
various methods to handle missing data and discuss the advantages and
limitations of our methodology. Despite known shortcomings this data set
provides valuable input, e.g., for climate impact research, in order to
consistently analyze economic impacts from pre-industrial times to the
future.
The tropical frontier in avian climate impact research