Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Economics 305
The situation in macro-economics is less encouraging. It reflects the main
trend of research in economics during the long interval which separated the
writings of the classical school from the thirties when, under the influence of the
great depression and the first Soviet experiments in planning, there was a revival
of interest in macro-economics. There are also certain objective difficulties.
For the purposes of macro-economic analysis, national income is the central
category. Its creation and distribution can be viewed from different angles, e.g.
physical composition of inputs and of the output; distribution of the income as
between the State and various social classes; division into consumption, in-
vestment, and stocks. These three optics are found simultaneously in Quesnay’s
Tableau dconomique, and in the well-known Marxian schemes of reproduction,
but their use is feasible only at a high level of aggregation. Marx used three
dichotomies : a) from the physical structure point of view, he distinguished
between consumer goods and producer goods; b) in the distribution of income,
between investment and consumption; and c) two social classes, the workers
who create the whole added value but whose share in it is represented by wages
only, and the capitalists who, being owners of the means of production, receive
profits, i.e. the difference between the value added and the wages. Marxian
schemes were meant not so much as tools for describing the economy as to per-
mit the elaboration of a theory of dynamics, and he succeeded by coupling
together the three optics mentioned above. But this no longer provides an
adequate framework for a more detailed description of the economy. Closest to
the Quesnay-Marx concept is theinput-output table. The chessboardrecordmeth-
odpermits two approaches simultaneously: a detailed analysis is made I) of the
physical composition of the inputs and outputs in physical or value terms, and
2) of the final destination of the products. However, the stakeof the socialclass-
es in the creation and distribution of the national income is overlooked. In many
systems of social accounting (an interesting example of borrowing from the mi-
cromethod of book-keeping and adopting it to the requirements of macro-eco-
nomics) each of the three approaches is the subject of individual accounting, the
input-output table in value terms being an integral part of a modern system of
social accounting.
Let us consider input-output tables. They provide a convenient analytical
framework for describing the branch structure of the economy (static approach),
for comparing the state of the economy at different periods (metastatics), or for
comparisons between countries. The chessboard record allows matrix algebra
to be used to a certain extent, and hence allows a relatively far-reaching use of
mathematics. The input-output method thus represents a considerable achieve-
ment, with broad prospects of application. However, there are certain difficul-
ties in rendering the input-output table dynamic, as all changes in technological
coefficients must be treated as exogenous data.
Furthermore, in input-output tables, and in social accounting generally, two
problems appear which are of significance for the whole body of economics:
the problem of aggregation (or rather of disaggregation, the point of departure
being the national economy as a whole), and the closely connected problem of
the measurement of economic magnitudes. For certain purposes, the national