Recently I discovered this gem of a text book by Geoffrey Hewings on the bookshelf of our Lab. Published in 1985, the book provides an excellent introduction to IO as well as the more advanced regional IO topics. The illustrations may seem a little simplistic by today's standards, but I'm really digging the minimalism.
The opening paragraph:
“Imagine a national economy that has been divided into a set of regions. Within each region, grouped into sectors, there is a set of firms producing a variety of commodities that are consumed by other firms in the course of the production of other more finished commodities (e.g., automobile parts are assembled into a finished automobile), consumers, government, export markets, or other firms using these commodities as investment goods. In addition to engaging in sales activities, firms are also active in the purchase of commodities and other inputs—labor, entrepreneurial skills, as well as commodities purchased from outside the region. It would not be unusual to find in a region of several million people well over 100,000 firms producing as many as half a million or more commodities.”
From further into the introduction:
“With the large number of firms, commodities, consumers, and other actors in the regional economy, it should be obvious that tracing the impacts on a firm-by-firm or consumer-by-consumer basis would be a daunting proposition. Clearly, we need some accounting system into which these interactions can be placed in the hope that some analytical method could be employed to trace the impacts in a systematic fashion. In a sense, we are going to have to sacrifice the richness of the reality of the regional economy for some reduced-form picture or model that is tractable and, we hope, representative as far as possible of the micro level interactions. As happens with a great deal of analytical work in the social sciences, the gains of model development are not without cost; as we shall see, this is the case in the development of a family of analytical tools that are referred to as social accounting systems. Regional input-output analysis is one subset of these accounting systems.”
Hewings, G., 1985, Regional Input-Output Analysis, Scientific Geography Series, SAGE Publications, ISBN: 9780803927407