OCTOBER 1951

INPUT-OUTPUT ECONOMICS--"This article is concerned with a new effort to combine economic facts and theory, known as 'interindustry' or 'input-output' analysis. Essentially it is a method of analysis that takes advantage of the relatively stable pattern of the flow of goods and services among the elements of our economy to show a much more detailed statistical picture. This method can portray both an entire economy and its fine structure by plotting the production of each industry against its consumption from every other. The method has had to await the modern high-speed computing machine as well as the propensity of government and private agencies to accumulate mountains of data. --Wassily W. Leontief" [Editors' note: Leontief won the 1973 Nobel Prize in economics for this system.]

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