Organizing Team:
Nikolaus Wolf (University of Warwick, United Kingdom)
Joan Ramón Rosés (Universidad Carlos III, Spain)

European economic history as it stands today is still little more than a collection of national economic histories. A truly European approach needs to overcome the artefact of aggregation along the lines of the 19th century nation states as set by national statistical offices. The Historical Economic Geography Project (HEGPro) aims to break down the economic development of nation-states into that of their regional units to produce a synthesis of Europe’s historical economic geography 1900-2000.

There are three priority areas within HEGPro. First we estimate the level of economic activity of European regions from 1900 onwards until 2000 in 10 years-intervals. More specifically, we will collect regional data on employment in agriculture, manufacturing and services, based on the regional units employed in Caramani et al. (2004). Furthermore, we will add data on regional wages and prices in these sectors. Together with available national GDP estimates for all European countries (Prados 2000) this allows estimating regional GDP since 1900 based on the methodology established by Geary and Stark (2002). It also makes it possible to describe the evolution of regional Market Potential over the 20th century, crucial for an understanding of regional evolutions.

The second priority area of HEGPro looks into the regional conditions for economic progress. Adding on our above mentioned estimates of the regions’ market potential, the focus here will be on the regions’ endowments with arable land, skilled labour, capital, and energy supply. While data on arable land is readily available, the key challenge will be to find suitable proxies for labour skills, capital and energy, which need to be both available and comparable over time.

Finally, the third priority area explores the connectivity and integration of Europe’s regions over time. As this information is necessarily incomplete due to fundamental problems of measurement we follow a twin-approach. We will complete previous work on the regions’ endowments with transport and communication infrastructure, which then allows exploring the dynamics of our regional price and wage data. Wherever possible, we will add regional trade-flow data to complement the picture, drawing on already existing data on the network of regional trade flows in Central Europe (1885-1939).