It paints a picture of the way economic development has spread throughout the world, raising living standards, widening but then narrowing the gap between incomes, fostering population growth and, when you combine the two, doing great damage to the globe's natural environment. The world's population stood at about a billion at the start of the 19th century, but has grown to more than 7 billion today. That growth was both a cause and a consequence of economic development and the technological advance it promotes. Advances in public health – particularly sewerage and clean water – led to falling death rates, which slowly encouraged people to have fewer children. Then advances in medical science took over, eventually including more effective means of contraception. But these improvements took a long time to spread from Western Europe and the "Western Offshoots" (Maddison's name for the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to the rest of the world. This is the story of the huge challenge the world economy has faced in the past 200 years: how to feed, clothe and house this growing world population. Overall, we've done it. Between 1820 and 2010, the world's average real GDP per person has increased by a factor of 10. Multiply that by the seven-fold increase in population and world real GDP went up by a factor of 70.

The first weakness in this materialist success story is obvious: this economic growth was spread very unevenly. In 1820, the richest country (Britain) was at most five times as wealthy as the poorest countries. By 1950 the richest countries were more than 30 times as well off. Only recently has the spread of industrialisation to China and India – which between them account for about a third of the world's population – caused global income inequality to begin declining. Another indicator the study examines is the movement in the real wages of unskilled labourers. They rise more or less in line with real GDP, suggesting that some income does indeed trickle down, even if it has to be helped along by government interventions such as minimum wages. During the first half of the 19th century, it was only in Europe and the Western Offshoots that unskilled wages were above subsistence level. By now, however, world unskilled real wages are about eight times what they were then. Of course, they were always highest in the Western Offshoots, with Western Europe catching up only since World War II. They're still low in south-east Asia and Africa.

Turning to education, in 1820 less than 20 per cent of the world's population was literate, and most of these were in Europe and its offshoots. Today, literacy is near 100 per cent almost everywhere, though in south-east Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, it's about 75 per cent and in the rest of Africa it's only 64 per cent. Much of the increase in literacy has been achieved since the war and decolonisation. It's been accompanied by rising average years of education in all parts of the world. Levels of global inequality are much lower for education than for income. At the start of the industrial period, average life expectancy at birth was about 40 years in Europe and its offshoots, and probably no higher than 25 to 30 years in most of the rest of the world. Only after the late 1890s did life expectancy start rising significantly. By now, it's almost doubled to about 80 years in the rich countries. Elsewhere, the catch-up started after the war, with most of the other world regions now up to about 60 to 70 years, and only Africa lagging significantly behind. Income inequality within particular European and offshoot countries has followed a U shape, declining between the end of the 19th century and about 1970, since when it has risen sharply. In other parts of the world, China in particular, recent trends have led to greater income inequality.

But when we turn to global income inequality, it was driven largely by increasing inequality between – as opposed to within – countries. It worsened until the 1950s but since then has stabilised. The other big weakness in the success story is, of course, what we've done to the quality of the environment. There's been a long-term decline in biodiversity worldwide. Emissions of carbon dioxide have been rising since the industrial revolution, with its shift to fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Although almost all the greenhouse gases that have built up in the atmosphere since the early 19th century are the result of economic activity in the developed countries, China's huge population and remarkably rapid industrialisation mean it has now taken over from the US as the world's largest emitter. Something tells me that, from here on, climate change and other environmental damage will be the main factor limiting the spread of industrialisation and prosperity to the remaining less-developed parts of the world. Ross Gittins is the economics editor.