Clio-Infra is a collaborative project that provides historical data on global economic development. The Biological Standards of Living theme brings together datasets on human heights and anthropometric inequality, reconstructed by birth decade and country from a variety of historical and scholarly sources.

This snapshot is an Our World in Data compilation of two Clio-Infra datasets curated by Baten and Blum (2015) on biological standards of living:

• Height (Baten and Blum 2015) — https://datasets.socialhistory.org/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10622/IAEKLA
• Height Gini (Baten and Blum 2015) — https://datasets.socialhistory.org/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10622/HKZPR9

Additional information: Methodologies used for data collection and processing. Reconstruction of heights by birth decade using a variety of different sources. Please see link for the complete list.

Additional information: Methodologies used for data collection and processing. Reconstruction of height ginis by birth decade using a variety of different sources. The height gini is a transformation of the coefficient of height inequality, based on Moradi and Baten's formula: g htgini=-33.5 + 20.5*cv.

Data quality: As good as possible, but counter-checking and improvement welcome. Interpretations on individual country level should be done with careful checking. An important caveat is many individual countries cannot be measured without a substantial amount of measurement error. The tendencies of anthropometric inequality by world region (in which country-specific measurement error tends to average out) is probably informative.

Publisher source: Data collated from a host of academic papers. Please refer to the link for the complete list.