The position of Metalworking Industries in the Structure of an Industrializing Economy

Estudios de Economía Aplicada includes in its Contributions section, both forgotten texts form relevant authors, and other specially interesting studies of general scope. This time, we have selected an unpublished study of Wassily Leontief written in 1966 jointly with Anne Carter (member of EEA Editorial’s Board) in the unforgettable framework of the Harvard Economic Research Project. This work, that was presented at a Moscow meeting, shows an example of Input-Output utilization to perform a production sector analysis and programming, applied to metalworking industries, a key sector for capital accumulation processes. Some time comparisons (between 1947 and 1858) and other spatial ones (between Japan and United States) are presented, and reduced forms from the full model are computed in order to show the high interdependence between the metalworking industries. It is very interesting to see how capital coefficients are computed because of their relevance to understand the key role played by this sector in economic development. The Dynamic Model application is also interesting in this analytical framework. This text, that deals with the role of input-output analysis in the economic development planning, is still relevant in the field of investment selection, both for newly industrialized countries, and for developed countries where firms have to take long term decisions that should be coherent in a future interdependent structural framework.