Why does one bother with estimating LTES at all?
The answer to the question varies undoubtedly from one person to another. The final outputs of the project should be as value neutral as possible so that they can be utilised for as many different purposes as conceivable. The neutral stance notwithstanding, it may also serve a good purpose to spell out here possible uses of the database as envisioned by those who promote the project, with the hope that this will stimulate further intellectual curiosity in such a way that the database may be subject to critical and constructive comments.
First and foremost, it serves as a basic indicator of macro economic performance over time and also of possible structural changes in the economy. Second, a very profitable use may be made of the macro economic time series as part of the study of comparative economic history ( or comparable economic development ).
The value of simple ( hopefully analytical ) description should not be underestimated, especially in view of the fact that sufficiently scrutinised empirical data are not always readily available at least in many regions of the world. The deficiency of the data is all the more serious if one looks for an objective ( value-neutral ) source of describing development performance from a comparative perspective.
More importantly, third, one would naturally be interested in proceeding to conduct hypothesis testing, for which long-term economic statistics will provide rich source materials. In fact we face quite a few unanswered questions in the world that surrounds us. If we are lucky, some of these riddles may be resolved by resorting to historical statistics. In the following, the present writer proposes to illustrate this point by referring to some interesting questions which have been posed by historians in the past.