Proceedings of Task Force Meeting in Input-Output Modeling (1981)

Work on input-output modeling at IIASA began in 1979 with Clopper Almon and Douglas Nyhus, and the third year of research in this area has now been completed. During this period there has been considerable progress in the construction, linking, and use of input-output models; the programs for the basic IIASA models have been modified so that they can be used on a number of different computer systems and a user's guide to the basic program SLIMFORP has been published by U. Sichra as IIASA Working Paper WP-81-114. With substantial help from IIASA and the Inter-Industry Forecasting project (INFORUM) at the University of Maryland, a self-organizing network of collaborating institutions has been built up to work on the development and linkage of input-output models. IIASA is particularly suitable for this type of coordination role because of its many contacts in all parts of the world. A Task Force meeting is held each year to draw together the results obtained by the collaborating groups and to discuss future research. The second of these meetings was held in September 1981 and was attended by 38 participants, representing 20 different institutions from 16 countries. This volume contains the papers presented at the meeting, and is divided into sectors dealing with the specific topics discussed in each session The first section deals with results and problems connected with the national models and contains contributions from D. Vanwynsberghe (Belgium); A. Dimitrov (Bulgaria); R. Courbis (France); G. Fink and A. Simon (Hungary); D. Bell (U.K.); and D. Nyhus (U.S.A.). The second session was devoted to work on modeling of personal consumption expenditure, and both criticism and extensions of the Almon model (which allows a good to be a complement to or a substitute for another good) were presented. Family budget and expenditure data were used to demonstrate methods which estimate income elasticities and which incorporate demographic effects. Contributions from P. Devine (U.S.A.); L. Grassini and M. Grassini (Italy); and G. Kornai (Hungary) are included in this section. In the third section the participants discussed the problems connected with investment functions and estimation. Papers by C. Ciaschini (Italy); O. Forssell (Finland); and A. Smyshlyaev (U.S.S.R.) deal with the development of improved estimation techniques. The fourth section contains papers on more general topics: A. Cavalieri (Italy) and A. Lotov (U.S.S.R.) discuss linkage in input-output models, and U. Ludwig (G.D.R.) considers the relationship between final demand and resources