Transcribing the Tableau Économique: Input-Output Analysis à la Quesnay

Abstract

Since its publication in 1955, Almarin Phillips' article “The Tableau Économique as a Simple Leontief Model” has inspired an interesting line of interpretation of the arithmetical schemes presented two centuries earlier by François Quesnay. Subsequent attempts to represent the Tableaux économiques in the form of Input-Output transcriptions by Shlomo Maital (1972), Bernhard Korte (1972), Tibor Barna (1975), and Paul Samuelson (1986), among others, have underlined the brilliance of the French doctor's formal conception of the economy as a reproductive system.