Talk:Gdp data.csv

The page consists of gross domestic product (gdp) data in .csv format. To view in a more intelligible form, copy and paste the text of the page into a text editor such as `Notepad' and save it as a file with the file extension .csv as the the last part of the filename. You can then open that file with just about any spreadsheet program and it will appear, presto!, as a nicely formatted table  showing the real per capita gdp's of England, the United States, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and Japan, with some data going as far back as 1840! Make sure that when you saved it a .txt file extension did not get tacked on after your .csv extension. Notepad will try to do that unless you tell it to save as `all files'.

Why am I abusing Communpedia readers with such an ugly page? Besides being, i think, important, this data was used to construct the graphs File:Usa-ussr_gdp_log_1885.png, and File:Gdp_real_per_capita_many_country.png , which I have uploaded onto this wiki. The root data are from the Maddison project, but who knows, that site might go down and Communpedia become the only place to get this important numerical information! Also my own calculations on the data, normalising it and logging it to make it graph nicely, are here in the .csv material.

The U.S.S.R. had such strong gdp growth. everybody should know about it.

The Maddison project recommends this form of citation: Bolt, J. and J. L. van Zanden (2013). The First Update of the Maddison Project; Re-Estimating Growth Before 1820. Maddison Project Working Paper 4.

Tribal (talk) 04:27, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

The layout of the table is as follows: There are three data columns for each country. The rightmost column is subtitled `gdp' and is the Maddison project data. The middle column is subtitled `ref. 1917' and is the Maddison project data for the country divided by its year-1917 datum, so that in this column for all countries the year-1917 value is 1.00. The leftmost column data are the logarithms (base 10) of the middle column data.