Revisiting Miyazawa on Multisectoral Multipliers

It was slightly more than thirty years ago that Miyazawa published his pioneering article on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the interindustry multipliers in an open Leontief model involving a foreign trade sector (Miyazawa, 1960). Notwithstanding the time that has elapsed since then, theoretical and empirical papers on multisectoral- and/or interindustry- multipliers, are still growing in various fields of economics and particularly, in regional science, studies focused on matrix multipliers in connection with multiregional input-output models are still prominent. This evidence suggests that Miyazawa, through a series of his papers on multisectoral multiplier analysis1 has not only exerted a wide and strong intellectual influence on the direction of research thereafter, but also laid a firm foundation of our present studies concerning matrix multipliers. Therefore, a revisitation of Miyazawa’s numerous contributions, in particular, that of Miyazawa (1976), which is undoubtedly the most prominent of his publications, is of some value at least as way of reminding ourselves just how far the research has progressed from such an important base.