For academic economists

The national-wealth literature is hard to extend because the underlying assemblies are bespoke and closed — you can cite a figure, but you cannot see, let alone rebuild, the pipeline that produced it.

You know the standard citation problem in this literature better than most: a wealth-accounting table shows up in a paper, the appendix gestures at a methodology, and the actual assembly — which agency series, which year, which judgment call filled which gap — stays inside someone’s private workbook. You can build on the headline number. You cannot build on the number’s construction, because the construction was never published as a first-class artifact. That is as true of most national-wealth and development-accounting work as it is of most regional-science extensions that try to push a national identity down to states or counties.

FAND treats the pipeline itself as the deliverable, not an appendix to one. The balance-sheet identity — what an economy owns, what it owes, and the trust infrastructure in between — is documented as a 12-stage build with a source agency directory behind every term: which upstream series, which table, which vintage, and what was done when a series didn’t cover the years needed. It is also, directly, a continuation of prior published work in this literature: John O’Connor led the Changing Wealth of Nations methodology at the World Bank, and the comparative-analysis page sets out where FAND’s identity now diverges from CWoN and why — a closed identity to the cent, gross rather than netted cross-border positions, institutional infrastructure measured rather than assumed. If your work engages with CWoN or its successors, that page is the fastest way to see what changed and what didn’t.

On reproduction, the honest state of things: the pipeline is documented — 128 builder scripts, a SHA-256 audit trail, a manifest pinning each release’s source-data snapshot — but the public GitHub repository the documentation describes is not live yet, and the replication page says so rather than linking a URL that doesn’t resolve. If you’re deciding whether to cite, replicate, or extend a specific figure, the fastest path is telling us which one; we’ll walk you through the sources and the exact steps directly rather than handing you a package that fails on your machine.

The convergence essay is the concrete case for why this matters to your field specifically: it’s not a finding stated and footnoted, it’s a finding built entirely on one normalized panel — every country’s net worth relative to the US frontier, year by year — with the self-check numbers shown in the source note. Ninety-one percent of the countries that reached their high-water mark under Bretton Woods have since fallen back below 30% of the US frontier, and the essay is explicit about the strongest opposing reading. That’s the kind of claim a reviewer in this literature can actually interrogate, because the panel it’s built on is the same one you’d be extending.

Start with the source directory and the glossary to get the vocabulary and inputs straight, read the CWoN comparison if your work touches that lineage, then look at the replication page before deciding what you’d want to rebuild.