A New Image of Classical Key Sector Analysis: Minimum Information Decomposition of the Leontief Inverse

This paper provides a theoretical framework for the Rasmussen-Hirschman key sector analysis based on a minimum information approach. This approach introduces a separation of information about regional economic structure into two parts. In the first part, knowledge about economic structure, extracted on the basis of minimum information included in the row and column multipliers, is extracted from the Leontief inverse matrix. The second part presents the specifics of synergetic interactions between different sectors of the economy. A corresponding intensity matrix represents the strength of the fields of influence of simultaneous multiple changes. From this formulation, a minimum information decomposition of the Leontief inverse is shown to exist and applied to Chinese input-output tables for 1987 and 1990.