ABSTRACT
Under almost any set of realistic assumptions, increments of industrial exports should increase the value of total production by more than their own value . . . This means that the indirect as well as direct effects of the late-nineteenth-century export decline must somehow be evaluated . . . About the best means now known for obtaining such measurements is the Leontief input-output table. The author has constructed such a table for the British economy of 1907 . . . The level of industrial activity that would have been generated if exports had maintained the 1854-1872 rates of growth, everything else assumed unchanged, was found by replacing the actual exports with the theoretical exports [and using the input-output table] to arrive at the implied direct and indirect requirements of industrial ou tpu t . . . the results tend to support the hypothesis that if the rate of growth in industrial exports had been maintained, the United Kingdom could have sustained its former high-level advance in industrial production . . . The input-output results . . . [substantiate] the plausibility of retarded exports as an explanation of nineteenthcentury stagnation in the United Kingdom.3
