Changing output‐input relations within the national economic accounts

The national economic accounts provide the framework for a comprehensive numerical description of the economy. The most significant work of this decade in U. S. national accounting will be the integration of the related informational systems that have been developed in the past decade into the basic income and product accounts. This paper discusses one of the related bodies of estimates — real factor cost (input) and product (net output) by industry—developed by the author. These estimates are a link between the national production account and the interindustry matrix. There is wide dispersion among industries and variability over a time period, in the rates of change of output in relation to the factor inputs, singly and in combination. But in almost all industries and over most decadal periods in this century, total factor productivity has risen. Capital has grown faster than labor input, but savings in capital as well as in labor have been recorded in most industries. There also have been substantial savings in purchased materials in many sectors, but in agriculture, purchased products have risen significantly faster than gross output. There are interesting systematic relationships among the several major “partial” productivity ratios. Logistics and general economic or business forecasting and planning must allow for changing input‐output relations, especially over longer time periods. Productivity time‐series are a necessary background for projections, but they must be supplemented by special studies. See The National Economic Accounts of the United States. Hearings before the Subcommittee in Economic Statistics of the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), especially the Appendix containing the Report of the National Accounts Review Committee, National Bureau of Economic Research.