Ten Nobels for the future

Wassily Leontief was born in St. Petersburg in 1906. He received a degree in Economics in 1925 and continued his studies at the University of Berlin, where he received his PhD in 1928. After working as an advisor to the Chinese government in Nanking, he came to the United States in 1931 at the invitation of the National Bureau of Economic Research and moved the following year to Harvard University, where he became Professor of Economics in 1946. In 1948 he created the Harvard Economic Research Project and served as its director until 1973. In 1975 he became Professor of Economics at New York University. He founded the Institute for Economic Analysis at NYU in 1978, serving as its director until 1985, and is now senior scholar there.

In 1973 Leontief was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in developing the input-output method of analyzing relationships among the various sectors of the economy, enabling us to describe the structure of an economic system and highlight the effects that changes in one sector can have on part or all of the general system. The many honours he has received include the Légion d'Honneur, the Order of the Rising Sun and the French Order of Arts and Letters. He was also president of the American Economic Association in 1970.

In 1988 Leontief was commissioned by the United Nations to explore the development prospects of the world economy through the year 2000 and the possibility of narrowing the gap between developed and less developed countries. In addition to hundreds of scientific papers, he is the author of The Structure of the American Economy 1919-1929 (1941), Input-Output Economics (1977) and The Future Impact of Automation on Workers (with F. Duchin, 1986). Among other international positions, Leontief directed the preparation of a "General Transportation Plan" for Italy.

1994
Technological
advancement,
employment
and the distribution
of income between labor
and capital