2021-08-05 :: 115 years of the Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, the founder of the Leontief Center V. Leontiev

August 5 marks the 115th anniversary of the Nobel Prize laureate in economics, the founder of the Leontief Center V.V. Leontiev.

V. Leontiev was born on July 23, 1906 (August 5, new style) in Munich in the family of an economics professor. Almost immediately, the family moved to St. Petersburg. In 1925 he graduated from the Leningrad State University, and in 1928 - from the University of Berlin, after which he received his doctorate and began working as an economic adviser to the Minister of Railway Transport in Nanjing (China). In 1931 he moved to the United States and began working at the National Bureau of Economic Research, then (since 1932) at Harvard University. Since 1936, he worked on the creation of a theory of intersectoral analysis based on input-output tables, on the basis of which 41 sectors of the American economy were subsequently described. In 1944 he completed the first input-output table for the US Department of Labor. In 1946, on the initiative of V.V. Leontyev created the Harvard Economic Research Institute, which he headed until 1972. In the years 1948-1956. commissioned by the US government, he made a study of the structure of the American economy. In 1960-1970, acting as a consultant, he helped in the implementation of intersectoral analysis and planning in the USSR. In 1970 he was elected President of the American Economic Association. In the same year, he built a variant forecast of the development of the world economy for 30 years. In 1973, the name of Vasily Vasilyevich Leontiev went down in history forever - he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the theory of intersectoral analysis, which by that time was already widely used in many countries of the world. In 1988 he was elected a foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1991, on his initiative, the Leontief Center International Center for Socio-Economic Research was established in St. Petersburg. In 1993 V.V. Leontiev last visited St. Petersburg, meeting with employees of the Leontief Center, St. Petersburg State University, the School of Economics, and the city administration. Died in a New York hospital on February 5, 1999. V.V. Leontiev was an honorary member of a number of universities, including Paris (Sorbona), Pennsylvania, Brussels, Lancaster, York, Toulouse, Budapest. Among the awards of Vasily Vasilyevich Leontiev are the Order of the Cherubim (Italy), the Order of the Legion of Honor (France), the Order of the Rising Sun (Japan). 

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