The project focuses on the comparison of three important dimensions of living standards: Numeracy as measured with the age heaping strategy (see below), in order to approximate one important dimension of human capital; Inequality of incomes within the European societies; Anthropometric indicators, in particular heights of both adults and children.

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.

Among other things, GLOBALEURONET aims to promote research on European market integration, on macroeconomic and financial fluctuations, and on economic growth. This project intends to make contributions to all three areas, building on recent developments in statistical large-scale aggregation of information.

GLOBALEURONET will address its objectives through a series of integrated scientific activities. They will take place at various locations within participating countries.

GlobalEuroNet organizes each year a Summer School, under the scientific endorsement of the European Historical Economics Society (EHES) and in cooperation with the Marie-Curie Research Training Network ‘Unifying the European Experience’.

Economic history has emerged in many European countries as a dynamic discipline based on rigorous analytical categories and empirical methods. The demand for education and training in theoretically-driven analysis of the past has been relentlessly growing since the 1980s, and new centers promoting excellence in teaching and research have been established. Economic historians provide now both undergraduate and post-graduate students in economics, business, social and political sciences all over Europe with a long-run perspective of the sources of economic growth, the expansion of international trade, the international movements of capital and labour, or the role of institutions in enhancing (or hindering) economic development. Read more

History matters for the future of Europe in a globalizing world. European institutions are the outcome of a long historical process of development. Many of them were created or shaped in the past as a reaction to the forces of economic integration. Moreover, in spite of wide differences among countries, Western Europe offers, in broad terms, a coherent socio-economic model based on the coexistence and positive integration between market and non-market institutions. The European historical experience demonstrates that regulation, coordination rules and market integration can successfully complement and reinforce each other, and that markets tend to perform better if they are embedded in a range of non-market institutions whose function is to create, regulate, stabilize and legitimate markets. This is exactly the argument some critical observers are putting forward in the current globalization debate. How should European institutions adjust to current globalizations?