World Economy Historical Statistics is the self-described “companion volume” to Maddison's World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris: OECD, 2001. The Millennial edition is the latest of the author's long series of highly influential books documenting world income growth. World Economy: Historical Statistics brings this work into the information age of the twenty-first century by extending the data to 2003 and updating some entries. More importantly, this work provides the data and text in a machine-readable form on a single, portable CD. In this new format, this publication will be an indispensable resource for any reference collection of economic data on electronic media.

The publication includes two parts. The first part is an excel file containing total income, population, and income per capita data for 165 countries over periods ranging from 1500AD to the present. In addition to the national data, Maddison presents estimates for major regions of the globe, including Western Europe, the Western Offshoots (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States), Eastern Europe, Successor Republics of the USSR, Latin America, East Asia, West Asia, and Africa. Estimates for the world as a whole are also reported for key benchmark years from 1500 on. The second part is 273 pages of text in ten English-language pdf files that briefly discuss and more comprehensively document how Maddison created and assembled the income data in each major region. This text is also available in a single French-language pdf file. Tables in the pdf files report for interested readers additional “conjectural” estimates of population and income (measured in 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars) for Egypt, Morocco, and other parts of Africa in the years 1AD and 1000AD. This should give a sense of the sweeping coverage of this publication.

My hope is that users of the CD will download and read the pdf files. They will learn about the pioneers of macro-measurement and read Maddison's thumbnail sketches of the development process in the major regions. They will then study his careful descriptions of the sources and methods that he used to generate his estimates, including those he labels “conjectures.” Thus prepared, the readers will have a better sense of what we know and how well. Future researchers will use such information to build on, critique, refine, and in some cases, replace the current numbers. The new CD does an excellent service by putting this detailed documentation at a computer user's fingertips.

My fear is that users of the CD will never open these pdf files, and instead immediately push the button to download the excel spreadsheets containing the income and population data. Such is the hunger for numbers, any numbers, as long as they can be labeled the “best available.” As one who is skeptical of, yet interested in, research using panels of cross-county income estimates to tease out the determinants of economic growth, I worry that the easy access to the data on this CD will only encourage and enable researchers to “see what the numbers show.” I worry such users will ignore that the estimates come, in many cases, with wide, unspecified error bands. The audience (and editors and referees) will have to retain and rigorously exercise their judgment.

I did find the data extremely easy to access and highly useful. The pdfs, however, lacked an index or search function that would have allowed pinpointing relevant material. Finally, out of concern about how these data will be used, I will step close to the line set out in this Journal's instructions to book reviewers against using valuable journal space to point out “minor errors of fact.” In a handful of cases (more specifically for the Asian aggregate before 1800), total income as published did not equal population times per capita income. The reason for this discrepancy is not clear from the excel file.

To conclude, Angus Maddison does a great service making his important work available to researchers in this electronic format. This CD will be an invaluable resource in any scholarly reference collection on economic growth and development.