Leontief's contribution to economics

It is often difficult to pinpoint an individual economist's contribution to his discipline but Leontief's is clear. While his interests and publications are wide-ranging, he has dedicated most of his extraordinary energy to the development of input-output analysis, involving himself directly at all levels, from fundamental theory to very specific data. He paved the way for systematic large-scale modeling efforts and for a sounder empirical base for all of economics. This review can only touch upon some highlights of the impressive corpus of his pioneering work.