Research Areas

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?

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.

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.

The Historical National Accounts project aims to give a quantitative overview as to how the various parts of Europe have developed in the long run and to produce a Europe-wide database on economic growth and productivity, covering the highest possible number of European countries. Furthermore, the aim is to organise education and training activities around this research agenda and to stimulate comparative analyses on levels and growth rates of productivity and economic welfare. The final results of this project will be embedded in the data-hub on long-term economic growth and structural change of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre.

The LEG network (Long-term Energy- Growth), with a hub at Lund University, aims at establishing a consistent long-run dataset (1800-2000) for energy, including traditional energy sources, based on comparable standards across an increasing number of European countries. The long term objective is to create a data-base on energy that will be openly available for researchers, and to shed light on the crucial issue of how important energy is for economic growth.

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.