Summary of Work on Silver Production Data 1870-1900

Our work is based on the valuable data presented in volume 189 of the Moneta series, directed by Georges Depeyrot1. The three volumes of the series include, among other data, annual silver production data for 28 countries, covering both huge suppliers, such as Unites States, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Germany and so forth, and tiny producers, such as Finland, Norway, Sweden and so on. We believe that the documentation covers almost all silver-producing countries. It was natural, then, for us to sum the production of all countries, year by year, to estimate the global level of silver production. (India and Uruguay are not taken into account, because data are available for only one year in each of them, making it difficult to simulate missing values.) In the accompanying graphs, we compare our sums of national-level data to the global totals that were prepared at various times in the past and included in Volume 1 of the three-volume series.