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Wassily Leontief et la science économique

Wassily Leontief et la science économique

Suivi de « Les mathématiques dans la science économique », de Wassily Leontief


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Wassily Leontief and Economics
Followed by Mathematics and Economics" by Wassily Leontief

In Europe, Wassily Leontief is remembered mainly for his input-output tables, which are considered a useful tool for national accounting. However, the scientific project which led to the development of IOTs has been ignored. IOTs were developed by Leontief at Harvard in the 1930s, as a component of a scientific scheme designed to make economics a genuine empirical science. IOTs were, indeed, conceived as an accounting matrix twinned with a mathematical model of general economic equilibrium. The scheme was designed as an alternative to econometrics, as Leontief considered the latter ill-equipped to link economic theory with statistical measurement. As Alain Desrosières once stated, in economics, the "marriage" between economic theory and statistics was slow to emerge and the connection was not straightforward.. This essay presents Leontief's economic methodology and shows how it has contributed to the main methodological debates in economics. We also republish a French translation of Leontief's 1954 work "Mathematics and Economics".