Multipliers and supermultipliers in a multisectoral framework: macroeconomic tools after all?

Abstract

The paper aims to show that the common mistake of considering Keynesian income and/or employment multipliers as sector-specific, in a multisectoral framework, is taking its way back to economics. The phenomenon coincides with the recent debate about the macroeconomic Sraffian supermultiplier and generates some new miscommunication by using similar terminology to sectoral multipliers. A revival of the tradition of the multiplier as a matrix can be encountered in Mariolis (2018) despite the lack of references about the macroeconomic Sraffian supermultiplier. On the other hand, Dejuán (2014) presents the macroeconomic Sraffian supermultiplier as a set of vertically hyperintegrated sectors without making a truly macroeconomic connection between sectoral multipliers and that ones for the economy as a whole. In order to throw some light on this issue, the present paper emphasizes the diferences between the traditional input-output multipliers and its Keynesian counterparts, showing also the required adaptations for supermultiplier representations. Keynesian multipliers and Sraffian supermultipliers emerge as typical macroeconomic concepts, in spite of the fact that the knowledge on production structure and consumption (and investment) patterns is mandatory to capture them in a multisectoral framework. Some estimates for multipliers and supermultipliers are also presented using data from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD).