Introduction

There has been an enormous output of research, developments, extensions, and applications of input–output models in the decades since the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the subject first entered an academic curriculum at Harvard University. The increasing capacity and speed of modern computers has contributed to this work by facilitating large-scale data-intensive experiments that were unthinkable in the early days. Throughout the text we have identified many of these extensions and applications, but there are many topics that we have not been able to include or reference in the preceding chapters. So, in addition to those topics to which we have referred but not developed further for one reason or another in previous chapters, here we explore several additional areas, primarily to give some possible guidance to the relevant literature, should the reader wish to explore one or more of these topics. (To sort out the appropriate literature, we depart from the practice in earlier chapters and include references at the end of each individual section.)

In particular, in this chapter, we survey a number of topics that presently are either frontier areas in input–output analysis or that relate input–output to other types of economic analysis that we have not included or only briefly addressed in previous chapters. We do not cover these topics in as much detail as those covered in previous chapters, in some cases because the topic involves methods beyond the scope of the present volume, such as statistics, econometrics, or mathematical programming.