Leontief, Wassily W.

Leontief, Wassily W. (1906-1999), Russian-American economist and Nobel laureate. Leontief was born in St Petersburg and educated at the Universities of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and Berlin. He emigrated to the United States in 1929 and joined the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York. In 1931 he began his long tenure as a member of the faculty of Harvard University.

Leontief's Nobel Prize for Economics (1973) cited him for his creation of the input-output technique. Input was defined by Leontief as the goods and services that each industry buys from all the other industries, output as the products industry sells to the others. By this method, the variations in the flow of goods from one industry to another can be graphically demonstrated. Economists use his method to analyse, plan, and predict economic changes.