More than 250 academics, scientists, researchers, innovators, educators and policymakers from across the world and from diverse fields will be gathering on July 2-5 in Santiago, Chile at the 30th International Input-Output Association (IIOA) Conference and 12th Edition of the International School of I-O Analysis.
The event – convened by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the IIOA – is supported by Andrés Bello University, the Central Bank of Chile and the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The main theme of the conference is “Rethinking industrial and trade policies in the new global context using Input-Output economics.” The global political economy context has prompted a reshuffling in global value chains, which are shifting towards more resilient, reliable, sustainable and secure national and international production patterns. This has encouraged both developed and developing countries to rethink and reinforce industrial and trade policies.
Input-Output analysis is a quantitative matrix method for studying the interrelationships between all the productive sectors of an economy. It is currently one of the most relevant methodological tools in economic analysis within and between numerous economies. Its use has spread across different areas, ranging from the analysis of export production and calculation of the value added, to the analysis of sectoral employment by gender and wages, the environmental impact of sectoral production, and the design of industrial policies, to name a few.
This type of analysis converges and intersects in various ways with ECLAC’s thinking on the importance of planning, of productive development policies, of the need for sectoral productive efforts, and of regional productive integration, among other areas.
“I see a very important convergence and synergies between your work on input-output analysis and ECLAC’s recommendations. There is no doubt that input-output analysis can help us to advance our approach in many ways: identifying key sectors that have the potential to further expand regional value chains and evaluating the forward and backward linkages, the employment creation effects, the technological characteristics and the environmental and social impacts of industrial and trade policies”, ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, indicated at the conference’s opening ceremony, held this Tuesday, July 2.
“To avert a third lost decade, ECLAC recommends that countries expand their productive development policies and undertake a major productive transformation, for which we need sectoral policies, and we have proposed 14 sectors to drive growth, such as the energy transition, electromobility, the circular economy, agriculture and sustainable tourism, among others,” the senior United Nations official emphasized.
Also participating in the opening ceremony were Sanjiv Mahajan, President of the Council of the International Input-Output Association (IIOA) and Head of Methods and Research Engagement at the Office for National Statistics of the United Kingdom; Gloria Peña, Director of the Statistics and Data Division at the Central Bank of Chile; Claudia Sanhueza, Undersecretary for International Economic Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile; and Miguel Vargas, Dean of the Economics and Business School at Andrés Bello University.
The Conference will include several plenary sessions, combined with parallel sessions on diverse topics. The full programme is available on ECLAC’s website.
It will also feature keynote speeches by Dr. Ya-Yen Sun of the University of Queensland, Australia; Professor Thijs ten Raa of Utrecht University in the Netherlands; and Dr. Sébastien Miroudot of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
