NWO Groot funding for CLIO-INFRA

Some countries have become quite rich in the (recent) past, others have remained poor. New theoretical insights in economics – such as new institutional economics, new economic geography and new growth theory – and the rise of global economic and labour history mean that these processes can and should be studied on a world scale. The issue of global inequality can only be tackled on the basis of global datasets for analyzing patterns of economic performance and their causes. For most necessary indicators, these datasets are lacking. Moreover, the data that are available are not always based on state of the art information of the countries and regions involved. Thus, datasets will be improved or created on, for instance, standard of living, human capital formation, and cultural and political institutions. Economic and social historians from all over the world will come together in thematic collaboratories, to gather and share their knowledge on the most relevant measures of economic performance and its causes. The pooled data will be standardized, harmonized and preserved for future use. New indicators to study inequality will be developed.

These pooled resources form datasets that are accessible via a central portal, which will also provide visualisation tools to explore the data, map global diversity and convergence etc. Among others, we will use the software from Statplanet and Gapminder.

The long term aim of the project – as developed by the International Economic History Association – is to change the 'rules of the academic game' in such a way that more efficient ways of cooperation are made possible and the exchange of data is facilitated. These new rules – such as the Data Availability Policy - are institutional adaptations in response to the greater possibilities for cooperation and exchange made possible by modern e-technology.

The main partners in the project are Utrecht University, International Institute of Social History, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), and the Virtual Knowledge Studio. The task of the VKS will be to support the creation and the functioning of the collaboratories, among others by the continuous improvement of the Virtual Research Environment.

The NWO subsidy amounts to 1.423.000 Euro. The total project budget is 2.700.000 Euro. For more information, see the CLIO-INFRA website