i. Central statistical agencies ii. Historical reconstructions iii. Estimates iv. Conjectures Estimates. Please bear in mind that the quantity and quality of available information on universities vary by period and geographical area. Even the definition of university is not universal: in some countries even colleges offering undergradute programmes can be named universities (Latin America, Japan, Near East). Even though efforts has been made to count institutions which fulfills the European concept of a university (i.e. offering postgraduate and especially PhD programmes), the lack of information may have resulted in overestimation of university foundations in third-world countries. For this reason, the most reliable estimates are those for Europe. For outside Europe, the data is more reliable for the pre-1945 period than thereafter. When the data is used for statistical analysis, using country fixed effects is advised to explicitly take such international differences into account. The dataset records only the foundation of new universities not the cessation of activates. Hence adding up the number of university foundations will overestimate the number of universities currently in operation. It should also be noted that national legislations also changed and this may result in spikes of university foundations: this happens when lower category higher or post-secondary educational institutions are reclassified as universities. Universities occasionally report the foundation date for their non-university predecessors only, probably in order to look more prestigious (some Eastern European universities are especially notorious in this respect). Whenever possible, it is the year when university status was granted that is reported. It is also possible that more universities have the same predecessor and hence report the same year of foundation leading to an overestimation. This source of bias could not be eliminated. Be aware that the dataset reflect current borders. In other words, universities may appear in countries that did not even exist at the year of foundation or do not exist today (we do not report data for the USSR or East/West Germany etc.). This approach was chosen to avoid the incomparability of estimates over time. The current version has 1470 university foundations. Countries in the database are: Albania, Angola, Antigua and Barbadua, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain. Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, Columbia, China, Congo, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Dem. Rep. of Congo, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Macao, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Oman, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, U.S. Virgin Islands, UAE, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, Vietnam, Yemen, India, UK

General references

For Europe the main sources are:

de Ridder-Symoens , Hilde (ed.): A History of the University in Europe. Vol. II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500 - 1800), Cambridge University Press, 1996

Rüegg, Walter (ed.): A History of the University in Europe. Vol. III: Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800 - 1945), Cambridge University Press, 2004

Rüegg, Walter (ed.): A History of the University in Europe. Vol. IV: Universities Since 1945, Cambridge University Press, 2011

For the rest of the world the main sources are the English language Wikipedia and the homepages of universities when the information at Wikipedia was not sufficient. Wikipedia was also used to update the data on European universities, since the above listed books underestimate the number of universities, especially in East- and Southern Europe. AS a principle, only public or accredited private universities are listed. Special universities like religious studies, fine art and music and military academies are omitted whenever it was possible.

In 2010, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded a subsidy to the Clio Infra project, of which Jan Luiten van Zanden was the main applicant and which is hosted by the International Institute of Social History (IISH). Clio Infra has set up a number of interconnected databases containing worldwide data on social, economic, and institutional indicators for the past five centuries, with special attention to the past 200 years. These indicators allow research into long-term development of worldwide economic growth and inequality.

Global inequality is one of the key problems of the contemporary world. Some countries have (recently) become wealthy, other countries have remained poor. New theoretical developments in economics - such as new institutional economics, new economic geography, and new growth theory - and the rise of global economic and social history require such processes to be studied on a worldwide scale. Clio Infra provides datasets for the most important indicators. Economic and social historians from around the world have been working together in thematic collaboratories, in order to collect and share their knowledge concerning the relevant indicators of economic performance and its causes. The collected data have been standardized, harmonized, and stored for future use. New indicators to study inequality have been developed. The datasets are accessible through the Clio Infra portal which also offers possibilities for visualization of the data. Clio Infra offers the opportunity to greatly enhance our understanding of the origins, causes and character of the process of global inequality.