This award will support a series of small U.S.-French workshops on the topic of input-output analysis of household consumption. The workshops will be organized by Professors Wassily Leontief and Faye Duchin of the Institute for Economic Analysis, New York University, and on the French side by Dr. Bernard Real, Groupe de Recherche sur les Besoins, University of Social Sciences, Grenoble. The workshops aim to establish a framework for a detailed representation and analysis of the changing structure of households and their activities, which will eventually be integrated within the input-output model of the productive sectors of the economy already developed by the Institute for Economic Analysis. Specifically the workshops will develop guidelines for a detailed, quantitative description of households and their activities and will develop a methodology for projecting future household consumption activities reflecting different technological innovations by the following steps: 1) establishment of an operational concept of household consumption activities and units of measurement; 2) a systematic and comprehensive classification scheme for households; 3) analysis of household activities in terms of a set of processes and the technological requirements for carrying out these processes; 4) application of the methodology developed in the previous steps to the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Surveys for 1982-83; and 5) a series of field studies concerning adoption of innovations by households. These steps will provide the framework for a model capable of analyzing technological change in different types of households. Under this proposal a prototype framework will be developed for a limited number of households and process categories capable of expansion to a more comprehensive model in future work. The qualifications of the U.S. and French participants are outstanding. Professor Leontief is a Nobel laureate, who continues to dominate the research in input-output technology. The results of this joint project should provide valuable information for economic researchers working on the subject of the impact of automation on labour.
