MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES
Input-output method. History and essence of scientific discovery Directory / The most important scientific discoveries In the input-output method, the research talent of a brilliant economist was most fully revealed Vasily Vasilyevich Leontiev. The basis of Leontiev's approach to planning was laid by the French "physiocrats" in the XNUMXth century, led by Francois Quesne. They proceeded from the incorrect thesis that only agricultural activity makes economic sense, and all other industries only consume resources. But at the same time they were able to offer a correct methodological approach to the problem of economic planning. The Physiocrats used "technological tables" to take into account everything that any economic system produces and consumes. A similar approach was developed mathematically in the nineteenth century by the French economist Léon Walras. Recognizing the Walrasian system of interdependencies, Leontiev was the first to put into practice the analysis of general equilibrium as a tool in the formation of economic policy. Vasily Vasilyevich Leontiev (1905–1999) was born in St. Petersburg. The father of the future Nobel laureate was a professor of labor economics at St. Petersburg University. At the age of fourteen, Vasily graduated from high school and in 1921 entered Petrograd University, where he studied philosophy, sociology, and then economics. Considered a child prodigy and despite the supremacy of the "only true" teaching, diamat, he allowed himself to be called a "Menshevik". In 1925, Leontiev had already completed a four-year course at the university and received a diploma in economics. Education then was conducted neither shaky nor roll: but the young man read many books on economics in Russian, English, French and German in the university library. After graduation, he got a job teaching economic geography, at the same time he applied for a visa to Germany to continue his education at the University of Berlin. Permission was granted six months later. In Germany, he continued his studies and began working on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin under the guidance of the famous German economist and sociologist Sombart and a prominent theoretical statistician, a native of Russia, Vl. Bortkiewicz. The topic of Leontiev's dissertation was the study of the national economy as a continuous process. Without leaving his studies, he began his professional career as a research economist at the Institute for World Economy at the University of Kiel, studying the derivative of the statistical demand and the supply curve. In 1928, Leontiev received his Ph.D. The depth of economic thinking was combined with Leontiev's strong mathematical background. In the late twenties and early thirties, he conducted a series of original studies on the elasticity of supply and demand, the statistical measurement of industrial concentration, the use of indifference curves to explain some of the patterns of international trade. One of the first scientific articles by Leontiev was devoted to the analysis of the balance of the national economy of the USSR for 1923-1924, which was the first attempt in the economic practice of those years to present in figures the production and distribution of the social product in order to obtain a general picture of the cycle of economic life. The balance was the prototype of the "cost-output" method developed later by the scientist. The article was written in German and published in October 1925. A translation into Russian entitled "Balance of the National Economy of the USSR. A Methodological Analysis of the Work of the CSB" appeared two months later in the December issue of the magazine "Planned Economy". In 1929, Leontiev went to Asia as an economic adviser to the Ministry of Railways in the Chinese government. After returning to Germany, he continued to work at the Institute of World Economy. In 1931, the director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (USA), a well-known American statistician, specialist in the field of analysis of economic cycles and market conditions, W. Mitchell, invited Leontiev to work in the bureau, and he moved to the USA. Since 1932, Leontiev began teaching political economy at Harvard University. In the same year, Leontiev organized a scientific team at Harvard called the Harvard Project for Economic Research, and headed it without interruption until it was closed in 1973. This Collective has become a center for research into economic processes using the input-output method. At the same time, all these years, Leontiev remained a professor at Harvard University, and from 1953 to 1975 he was also the head of the Department of Political Economy. Henry Lee. The algebraic theory of input-output analysis proposed by Leontiev is reduced to a system of linear equations, in which the parameters are the coefficients of production costs. The realistic hypothesis and the relative ease of measurement determined the great analytical and predictive capabilities of the input-output method. Leontiev showed that the coefficients expressing the relations between sectors of the economy (coefficients of current material costs) can be estimated statistically, that they are quite stable and that they can be predicted. Moreover, he showed the existence of the most important coefficients, the changes of which must be monitored in the first place. In the late eighties, at a meeting in the editorial office of the Pravda newspaper, the scientist was asked to tell how the input-output method was born, what it is. Here is what Leontiev said: “To predict the development of the economy, a systematic approach is needed. The economy of each country is a large system in which there are many different industries, and each of them produces something - industrial products, services, and so on, which are transferred to other industries Each link, component of the system can exist only because it receives something from others... ...Let's say we need to calculate the efficiency of bread production. We make a calculation: how much per ton to spend flour, yeast, milk, and so on for all components according to the recipe. Then we determine the labor costs in standard hours. All these calculations are done in natural (physical) terms. It is very important not to count immediately in money. Based on the calculations of the consumption of material resources and labor costs for a specific product or object in kind, the expected results in monetary terms are analyzed and compared. A similar approach is used in the calculation of any type of product - steel, cars, shoes. All preparatory calculations take into account the consumption of components necessary for the production of this type of product. And only then, taking into account prices and the level of wages, the most effective option for the production of final products is selected. Given this analysis, for example, the textile industry at one time migrated from developed countries to developing ones, as it required a lot of labor. And now, thanks to new technology, it is coming back." In the seventies, Vasily Vasilyevich wrote in one of his works: “In order to understand the meaning of the transformation leading to the construction of the so-called reduced input-output matrix for the national economy, let us ask the reader to mentally imagine a situation in which all enterprises of the country are divided into two groups: Group I - "contract" industries, Group II - "subcontract" industries. Any contract industry, that is, an industry from group I, covers its direct needs for the products of other industries of group I through direct purchases, and each industry of group II makes direct purchases from other industries of group II. However, the products of industries of group II, supplied to industries of group I, are produced on the basis of special contracts. Under the terms of such a contract, an industry of group I, placing an order in some industry of group II, provides the latter with the products of all industries of group I (including its own) in the quantity necessary to fulfill this order, for which this industry purchases all these goods (from industries that produce them). Group I) at your own expense. The relationship between the contract (I group) and subcontract (II group) industries, therefore, will be similar to the relationship between a consumer who independently purchases fabric, and a tailor who sews a suit from this fabric. Each industry of group I, determining the volume of purchases of goods and services produced by industries of the same group, will have to add to the direct needs of its own industry the goods and services that, according to the contract, will be processed for it by various industries of group II. The calculation of these total purchases gives the final vector of costs for any of the industries of group I ... ...These two tables differ from each other in the same way that an abbreviated train schedule, indicating only some major stations, differs from a complete detailed schedule, where all intermediate stops are also highlighted. The division of all sectors of industries into groups I and II must, of course, depend on the specifics of the task for which the aggregation serves. Using the reduced matrix in the planning process, we can be sure that if the flows of costs and output reflected in it in the industries of group I are balanced correctly, then the balance between the output and costs of all industries of group II that are not included in the matrix will also be ensured. “Input-output calculations (in Soviet science they began to be called economic and mathematical models of input-output balance) require modern computing technology, without which they really do not invade the world of economic analysis, forecasting and planning,” they write in the preface to Leontiev’s book Academician S.S.Shatalin and Doctor of Economics D.V.Volovoy - Starting from 1933-1934, Leontiev focused on overcoming these difficulties by collecting coefficients for a 44-industry input-output table (about 2000 coefficients) and draws up a plan Since the solution of a system of 44 linear equations turned out to be far beyond what was possible, 44 industries were combined into 10 for calculation purposes. The result of this study ("A Quantitative Analysis of Input-Output Relationships in the US Economic System") was published in 1936. The central place in it was occupied by a table of coefficients compiled for the US economy in 1919, with a dimension of 41x41. The following year, V.V. Leontiev published the work "Internal Relationships of Price, Output, Savings and Investments". Around the same years, V.V. Leontief works with MIT professor John B. Wilbur, the inventor of a computer capable of solving systems of nine linear equations. V. Leontiev reduced the 41-dimensional matrix to a 10-dimensional one and used the Wilbur computer to obtain the coefficients of the total costs of gross output for the production of a unit of final output. Leontiev may have been the first to use the computer in the study of the structure of economic systems. In 1941, a 41-dimensional table of interbranch flows was compiled, calculated for 1929, and then aggregated into a 10-dimensional table. On its basis, the volumes of gross output required to meet final demand (gross capital formation, current consumption, government purchases) were calculated. Comparison of the tables made it possible to check the stability of the coefficients of material costs and find out the possibilities of effective forecasting. Although the comparison of tables did not allow us to come to an unambiguous conclusion, nevertheless, intersectoral tables for forecasting were found to be quite appropriate. The Statistical Bureau of Employment of the United States, inviting Leontief as a consultant, compiled a table that includes 400 industries. It was used to predict the employment of the population in the postwar period. The input-output method has become widely used throughout the world. In 1944, Leontiev compiled a table of coefficients for current material costs for 1939 and, comparing it with the previous ones, found a sufficient degree of stability for most of the coefficients over two decades. Using the latter table, he published three articles in the Political Economy Quarterly between 1944 and 1946, in which, using his method, he estimated the influence of employment, wages, and prices on the gross output of individual branches of American industry. Since the late XNUMXs, after the founding of the Harvard Economic Research Project with the aim of applying and spreading the input-output method, Leontiev paid special attention to the development of inter-regional input-output analysis and the compilation of a matrix of investment coefficients with which one could judge the consequences changes in the final demand for investment. This was the beginning of the dynamic input-output method, on the basis of which it became possible to analyze economic growth. During the fifties and sixties, Leontiev improved his system. With the advent of more sophisticated computers, he increased the number of sectors of the economy to be analyzed, freed himself from some simplifying assumptions, primarily from the condition that technical coefficients remain unchanged despite price changes and technical progress. Based on the input-output method, Leontief and the staff of the Harvard Economic Research Project assessed the inflationary impact in wage regulation, calculated the cost of armaments and their impact on various sectors of the economy, forecasted the growth rate of sectors of the economy and the capital investments required for this. One of the most important results of these studies was the so-called. "paradox" or "Leontief effect", which consists in the fact that if we take into account the direct and indirect costs in the process of reproduction, then export for the United States turns out to be more labor-intensive and less capital-intensive than import. This means that although the US has a very strong investment environment and high wages, it imports capital and exports labor. Since the input-output method proved its usefulness as an analytical tool in the field of regional economics, Leontief chess balance sheets began to be compiled for the economy of individual American cities. Gradually, the preparation of such balance sheets became a standard operation. The Office of Interindustry Economics within the US Department of Commerce, for example, has begun publishing such balance sheets every five years. The UN, the World Bank and most of the governments of various countries of the world, including the USSR, adopted the Leontief method as the most important method of economic planning and budgetary policy. It has become the main component of the systems of national accounts of most countries of the world, is still used and improved by government and international organizations and research institutions around the world. Input-output analysis is recognized as a classic tool of economic analysis, and its author is considered the scientist who made the largest contribution to economic science of the XNUMXth century. In 1973, Leontief was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for his development of the input-output method and its application to the solution of important economic problems." Author: Samin D.K. We recommend interesting articles Section The most important scientific discoveries: See other articles Section The most important scientific discoveries. Read and write useful comments on this article. Latest news of science and technology, new electronics: Artificial leather for touch emulation
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