Wassily Leontief

Wassily Leontief (1905-1999) was a Russian-American economist who developed input-output analysis, a method for tracing how a change in one sector of an economy affects every other sector through the flows of goods and services between industries. Born in Munich and educated in Leningrad and Berlin, he left the Soviet Union in 1925 after opposing restrictions on academic freedom, and spent most of his career at Harvard University from 1932 to 1973. In 1949 he used one of Harvard's earliest computers to model interdependencies across five hundred sectors of the American economy, and he received the 1973 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for developing the input-output method and applying it to economic problems. He also documented what became known as the Leontief paradox, the finding that United States exports were more labor-intensive than its imports, contrary to what standard trade theory predicted.