The dataset 'Economic Growth in the Cape Colony' was downloaded from the Centre for Global Economic History website, of Utrecht University (http://cgeh.nl/economic-growth-cape-colony).
On these data and estimates the researchers based their reconstruction of GDP for the Cape Colony (1701-1795). In this dataset are also related data for the nineteenth century making it possible to bridge the gap between the estimates and the official series of national accounts for South-Africa starting in 1911. A large part of data for the eighteenth century are derived from: Pieter van Duin and Robert Ross, The Economy of the Cape Colony in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden 1987), but the researchers added data from various sources as well.
The details of the reconstruction and the interpretation of the results are presented in: Johan Fourie and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘GDP in the Dutch Cape Colony: The National Accounts of a Slave-Based Society’, South-African Journal of Economics, 81, 4 (2013), 467-490 (see the PDF in this data package). The estimation of the National Accounts for the Cape Colony are explained in the Statistical Appendix of this article (PDF, p.20-24).
Following a national accounts framework, the data show that Cape settlers’ per capita income is similar to the most prosperous countries of the time – Holland and England. This is partly explained by a highly skewed population structure and very low dependency ratio of slavery, and attempt to link the eighteenth-century Cape Colony experience to twentieth-century South African income levels.
