Input-Output Analysis
Input-output analysis is a practical extension of the classical theory of general interdependence which views the whole economy of a region, a country and even of the entire world as a single system and sets out to describe and to interpret its operation
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See also linkages. Selected works
1930. The Fur Trade in Canada. New Haven: Yale University Press; revised edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956. 1940. The Cod Fisheries. New Haven: Yale University Press; revised edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954. 1950. Empire and Communications. London: Oxford University Press; revised edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. 1951. The Bias of Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1956. Essays in Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bibliography
Neill, R. 1972. A New Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics of H.A. Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
input-output analysis
Input-output analysis is a practical extension of the classical theory of general interdependence which views the whole economy of a region, a country and even of the entire world as a single system and sets out to describe and to interpret its operation in terms of directly observable basic structural relationships. Wassily Leontief, a Russian-born American economist, started the construction of the first input-output tables of the American economy when he joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1932. These tables, for the years 1919 and 1929, were published together with the formulation of a corresponding mathematical model and numerical computation based on it in 1936 and 1937. Thus from the very outset the new methodology- for the development of which Leontief was awarded 40 years later a Nobel prize - emphasized the importance of close mutual alignment of systematic fact finding and theoretical formulation. In the late 1920s Leontief spent three years at the Institute for the World Economy at the University of Kiel (Germany) on derivation of statistical supply and demand curves. That early experience with curve fitting taught him not to rely on indirect statistical inference as a substitute for painstaking direct factual inquiry.
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With its emphasis on disaggregation permlttmg detailed quantitative description of the structural properties of all component parts of a given economic system, the input-output analysis moved in a direction directly opposite to that of the highly aggregative approach that began, approximately at the same time, to dominate fundamental economic research under the powerful influence of the Keynesian paradigm presented in Keynes's General Theory. Hand-in-hand with a disaggregated data base went an equally disaggregated theoretical model, the empirical implementation of which involved numerical computations exceeding in their complexity and scale anything that had been carried out up to that time along these lines in economics or any other social science. The limited capabilities of the Wilbur linear analog computer used in the first large scale computation forced Leontief to scale down his problem by neglecting some of the detail contained in the disaggregated data base. Subsequent rounds of computation were carried out at first on Howard Aiken's, Mark I and Mark II computers, and later on
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