SEMAINE D'ETUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L ANALYSE ECONOMETRIQUE ETC.
667
immediately grasped. One of the things by which one is most
‘mpressed, when looking at the real transactions which take
place in an economic system, is the great number of interrela-
tions among productive units. One’s first instinct is, therefore,
to inquire into these inter-industry connections and try to repro-
duce them analytically. This is the idea which already under-
lay QUESNAY’s tableau economique and which has been deve-
loped and given a full empirical content by LEONTIEF.
À different approach is taken in the pr>sent model. Not
« industries », in the input-output sense, but « sectors » are
taken as the basis of the whole investigation. And sectors are
defined in such a wav as to be vertically integrated. All inter-
relations which can be observed in the real world are looked
at as parts of a process which has not yet come to an end.
Any process reaches its completion only when the product
which comes out is a final commodity (consumption or invest-
ment goods). A vertically integrated sector is, therefore, from
an inter-industry point of view, a very complex one as it goes
through and through the whole intricate inter-industry con-
nections. However, from the point of view of the homogeneity
of the inputs, it becomes a very simple one, as it eliminates
all intermediate goods and resolves each final commodity into
its ultimate constituent elements: a (flow) quantity of labour
and a (stock) quantity of capital. It may be interesting to
recall that the procedure has already been used by LEoNn WAL-
RAS in his Elements of Pure Economics. although in a more
rudimentary way (%).
At a given point in time, between the two ways of looking
at the economic system there is really no logical difference.
Both models represent the same thing, looked at in a different
way. The difference, in other words, lies only in the classifica-
‘ion, and we can pass from the one to the other simply bv an
(?) See p. 241 of the English edition of Léon WaLras’s Elements d’éco-
nomie politique pure, translated. collated and edited bv W. Jarrè, Home-
vood (Ill.), 1053.
‘10] Pasinetti - pag. 97
