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Adam Tooze's account of the geopolitical precedents and antecedents of World War I includes a comparison of how Gross National Products of European Great Powers had evolved during the 70 years preceding 1914 (see chapter 1 of {cite}`Tooze_2014`).
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In this lecture we use Python, Pandas, and Matplotlib to download, organize, and visualize historical data on GDP growth.
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We construct a version of Tooze's graph later in this lecture.
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In addition to learning how to deploy these tools more generally, we'll use them to describe facts about economic growth experiences across many countries over several centuries.
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(An impatient reader can jump ahead and look at figure {numref}`gdp1`.)
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Such "growth facts" are interesting for a variety of reasons.
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Looking at his graph and how it set the geopolitical stage for "the American (20th) century" naturally
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Explaining growth facts is a principal purpose of both "development economics" and "economic history".
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And growth facts are important inputs into historians' studies of geopolitical forces and dynamics.
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Thus, Adam Tooze's account of the geopolitical precedents and antecedents of World War I begins by describing how Gross National Products of European Great Powers had evolved during the 70 years preceding 1914 (see chapter 1 of {cite}`Tooze_2014`).
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Using the very same data that Tooze used to construct his figure, here is our version of his chapter 1 figure.
(This is just a copy of our figure {numref}`gdp1`. We desribe how we constructed it later in this lecture.)
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Chapter 1 of {cite}`Tooze_2014` used his graph to show how US GDP started the 19th century way behind the GDP of the British Empire.
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By the end of the nineteenth century, US GDP had caught up with GDP of the British Empire, and how during the first half of the 20th century,
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US GDP surpassed that of the British Empire.
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For Adam Tooze, that fact was a key geopolitical underpinning for the "American century".
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Looking at this graph and how it set the geopolitical stage for "the American (20th) century" naturally
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tempts one to want a counterpart to his graph for 2014 or later.
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(An impatient reader might now want to jump ahead and look at figure {numref}`gdp2`.)
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(An impatient reader seeking a hint at the answer might now want to jump ahead and look at figure {numref}`gdp2`.)
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As we'll see, reasoning by analogy, this graph perhaps set the stage for an "XXX (21st) century", where you are free to fill in your guess for country XXX.
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@@ -53,6 +77,8 @@ from collections import namedtuple
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from matplotlib.lines import Line2D
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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## Setting up
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A project initiated by [Angus Maddison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison) has collected many historical time series related to economic growth,
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data
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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We can see that this dataset contains GDP per capita (gdppc) and population (pop) for many countries and years.
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Let's look at how many and which countries are available in this dataset
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len(data.country.unique())
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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We can now explore some of the 169 countries that are available.
# Create a dictionary to map each country to its corresponding color
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color_mapping = {country: color for country, color in zip(country_names, colors)}
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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## GPD plots
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Looking at the United Kingdom we can first confirm we are using the correct country code
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color=color_mapping['GBR'])
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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:::{note}
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[International Dollars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_dollar) are a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the U.S. Dollar has in the United States at any given time. They are also known as Geary–Khamis dollars (GK Dollars).
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plt.show()
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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We can now put this into a function to generate plots for a list of countries
As you can see from this chart, economic growth started in earnest in the 18th century and continued for the next two hundred years.
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@@ -294,6 +333,7 @@ draw_events(events, ax)
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plt.show()
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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The preceding graph of per capita GDP strikingly reveals how the spread of the industrial revolution has over time gradually lifted the living standards of substantial
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groups of people
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plt.show()
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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We can also look at the United States (USA) and United Kingdom (GBR) in more detail
In this section we describe how we have constructed a version of the striking figure from chapter 1 of {cite}`Tooze_2014` that we discussed at the start of this lecture.
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Let's first define a collection of countries that consist of the British Empire (BEM) so we can replicate that series in Tooze's chart.
At the start of this lecture, we noted how US GDP came from "nowhere" at the start of the 19th century to rival and then overtake the GDP of the British Empire
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by the end of the 19th century, setting the geopolitical stage for the "American (twentieth) century".
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Let's move forward in time and start roughly where Tooze's graph stopped after World War II.
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In the spirit of Tooze's chapter 1 analysis, doing this will provide some information about geopolitical realities today.
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### The modern era (1950 to 2020)
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The following graph displays how quickly China has grown, especially since the late 1970s.
It is tempting to compare this graph with figure {numref}`gdp1` that showed the US overtaking the UK near the start of the "American Century", a version of the graph featured in chapter 1 of {cite}`Tooze_2014`.
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## Regional analysis
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data.columns = data.columns.droplevel(level=2)
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```
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+++ {"user_expressions": []}
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We can save the raw data in a more convenient format to build a single table of regional GDP per capita
Looking more closely, let's compare the time series for `Western Offshoots` and `Sub-Saharan Africa` and more broadly at a number of different regions around the world.
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Again we see the divergence of the West from the rest of the world after the industrial revolution and the convergence of the world after the 1950s
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