PROTOCOLS FOR ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IN AMERICA

NOTE: Elements within the U.S. Government have been threating web site
administrators all over the internet and forcing them to take down the
following article because it's exposes the Bush/Cheney cabal's
involvement in the coming economic collapse of 2008.

Everyone make copies of this article and send it everywhere so
everyone will be fully aware of how the economic collapse was
engineered to happen on purpose.
-----------------------
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.  Everybody rolls with their
fingers crossed.  Everybody knows the war is over.  Everybody knows
the good guys lost.  Everybody knows the fight was fixed.  The poor
stay poor, the rich get rich.  That's how it goes,  Everybody knows" -
Leonard Cohen
PROTOCOLS FOR ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IN AMERICA
by
Al Martin
And this is how the U.S. Treasury would handle an economic collapse.
It's called the 6900 series of protocols. It would start with
declaring a force majeure, which would immediately be interpreted by
the marketplaces as a de facto repudiation of debt. Then the SEC and
the various regulatory exchanges would anticipate the market's
decline, hour by hour -- when Japan's markets opened the next day,
what would happen when the European markets, and all the inter-
linkages of the global markets. On the second day, US Special Forces
would be dropped in by parachute in the cities where the twelve
Federal Reserve district banks are located.
The origin of these protocols comes from the Department of Defense.
This is contingency planning for a variety of post-collapse scenarios.
Those scenarios would include, obviously, military collapse, World War
III, in other words, and its aftermath. What we're talking about now
is aftermath -- how the aftermath would be handled.
One does not necessarily know how the events would transpire that
would cause the collapse, whether it's military collapse or economic
collapse. In World War III, it would become obvious -- when the
mushroom cloud started to appear over cities.
Economic collapse scenarios were always premised on the basis of a US
declaration of force majeure on debt service. It's a very extensive
scenario. The scenarios are all together, i.e., military, economic,
political and social complete destabilization leading to collapse.
Then they break down individual scenarios. In the economic collapse
scenario, the starting point would be the United States Treasury
declaring a force majeure on debt service, which is de facto
repudiation, and that's how it would be interpreted by the world's
capital marketplaces. Then the scenario goes on from there. The US
Treasury would obviously declare a force majeure sometime after the
European markets had settled down. In other words, they had gone out
on the day, which means 11:38 a.m. EDT, our time. They'd wait until
the European markets closed, and the US markets had been open for a
couple of hours. That's when they'd determine how to begin the process
of unwinding or controlling the collapse to the best extent possible,
mainly because they know that the greatest hedge pressure would be
people seeking to use other markets to hedge their long exposure in
the United States and that the US would be the biggest seller in all
the rest of the world's markets. Therefore you would want to declare
the force majeure when the rest of the world's markets closed. The
declaration of force majeure would be precipitated by the declaration
that the United States is no longer able to service its debt. That's
pretty simple. Who makes that decision? The Treasury Department. The
President does not make that decision. The Secretary of the Treasury
does. He has that authority.
You might ask -- wouldn't he have his arm twisted not to do that?
The answer is that if there isn't any money left to service the debt,
it doesn't make any difference what the current regime might want to
do.
The day of reckoning is now coming. What has happened in the interim,
from 2001 to present, is dynamic, global economic deterioration. The
economic deterioration visited upon the United States by Bushonomics
is not a localized event. It is, in fact, global. We have a planet now
that is sinking into a sea of red ink.
The United States is consuming 80% of the planet's savings rate to
finance its debt. The central banks of Germany, Japan and Saudi Arabia
are no longer the powerhouses they used to be. Their reserves have now
been substantially depleted. They can, therefore, no longer hide the
fact that they own a certain number, likely in the trillions of
dollars, of U.S. Treasury debt that isn't being serviced, because they
can't hide it through bookkeeping tricks anymore because their
reserves are so depleted.
Therefore somebody has covertly been putting demands on the Bush-
Cheney regime for payment. Why do you think 2900 metric tons of gold
is depleted from U.S. inventory since March of `01?
Why do you think that $2 billion in currency seized from Iraq last May
is now unaccounted for?
Someone is putting demands on the Bush-Cheney regime. Someone is
saying to the Bushonian Cabal that -- You've got to start servicing
this debt because we, foreign central banks, are in nations - European
and Asian - whose reserves are now nearly exhausted.
Who could be putting that kind of pressure on them?
It has to be coming from whoever is organizing this thing at the very
top, which I would tend to think has got to be most likely a cabal of
people that would involve Henry Kissinger, James Baker, George
Schultz, possibly William Simon. It would be somebody at the very top
that is familiar with how to do this. It would have to be someone
familiar with finances.
So would this be one faction of a cabal blackmailing or forcing
another faction? No, it's not really blackmailing. It's being done out
of desperation. The German, Japanese and Saudi central banks are
saying to the Bushonian cabal, You've got to start servicing this debt
because we don't have the reserves to cover you anymore. We can no
longer make it appear that the debt is being serviced because our own
reserves are so substantively depleted. Therefore you must begin to
cover this debt. If you don't, then, at some point, we will have to
publicly admit in order to save our own necks -- that we were the end
buyers of a lot of stealth debt, a lot of debt that your Treasury
issued illegally and has never serviced. That would then expose the
whole cabal.
The Kissinger-Baker faction are at the top of how this was done on the
economic side of the equation. They were not the original insiders so
much, but the managers of the conspiracy from the U.S. Treasury, to
wit, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve role-play the part.
Take Henry Kissinger. It may not have occurred to anyone why in the
last 3 years Henry Kissinger has been back in Washington more than he
has in the last 30 years. And why are all these quiet meetings in
Washington with alleged senior Bush-Cheney regime officials, as
foreign news services endlessly put it. It's because Kissinger is the
point man. He's the one that is telling them the disposition of other
foreign central banks.
Kissinger would probably also be involved in transfer or hypothecation
of any assets from the cabal. In other words, they're being stolen
from the American people by the Bush-Cheney regime and the Bushonian
Cabal, and they are being used to hypothecate, transfer, service, or
otherwise carry this debt held by certain foreign central banks.
The process of unraveling has already begun because of ever-spiraling
Bushonian budget deficits. The Bush-Cheney regime, even in its overt
policies (now they're overt political, economic, social and military
policies) is generating $600-billion-plus deficit per year, which is
consuming 80% of the planet's net savings rate.
It doesn't have the slack. In other words, it can't refinance stealth
debt by issuing more stealth debt anymore. Nor can they bleed money
out of the system like they could in the 1980s by hiding it when the
overt policies of the Bush-Cheney regime are already producing a
budget deficit of 6% of Gross Domestic Product. There is no other
mechanism that they could use anymore to hide expansion of debt that
could be used to service said stealth debt, and they are, frankly,
running out of assets that they can steal from the American people.
So the proverbial day of reckoning is coming. The Bush-Cheney regime
(and I give them credit for this) are telling the American people
what's coming, knowing the American people are too stupid to
understand. They are telling the American people about the re-
institution of the Gold Confiscation Act and the sudden scrapping of
the Treasury's emergency post-collapse gold note scheme to maintain
domestic liquidity.
David Walker, US Comptroller General and chief of the GAO has said
that should the Bush-Cheney regime be re-ensconced into power and,
hence, the scourge of Bushonomics persist, that the United States
could no longer service its debt beyond 2009. They're not hiding it
from anybody anymore. They are telling you what's happening. Now, what
does that mean? The key is in what Walker is saying when he says the
debt can no longer be serviced. I've been asked this on the radio
shows. People have noticed what Walker said because he's out in the
news more often than he used to be. It's unusual for the Comptroller
General of the United States, which is a rather arcane position, to be
out in the news so much.
It simply means that when he says the United States will no longer be
able to sustain Bushonian budget deficits, he means that by 2009, if
Bush-Cheney have a second term in office, the United States will be
consuming 100% of the planet's savings rate to finance Bushonian
budget deficits.
Therefore, if the planet can no longer generate any more liquidity to
lend to the United States, one of three things have to happen: A)
There has to be a sudden and dramatic reduction in federal spending.
There are only two places that can come from. There would have to be
an immediate $100-billion cut in defense spending, which would end any
hopes the Republicans had of getting into office for years to come
because it would destroy any confidence the NFWCs (Naïve Flag Waving
Crowd) had in them. Or you would have to scrap the multi-trillion-
dollar Bushonian tax cuts for the Republican rich, something that's
equally unpalatable.
The other option, B, as Paul O'Neill mentioned, is a dramatic increase
in the rate of federal income taxation from the current nominal rate
of 28% to 65%, which is what the Treasury Department estimated would
be required post-2009 to provide the U.S. Treasury with sufficient
revenues to continue to service debt.
The third option, or C, becomes the declaration of a force majeure on
credit service of U.S. Treasury debt by the United States Treasury,
which is tantamount and would be accurately construed as de facto debt
repudiation by the United States of America.
There are other signs to look for. They're not going to happen now,
but if Bush-Cheney is re-elected, you'll begin to see more signs that
the end is coming. I know a lot of people may disagree, but you wait
and see. If Bush-Cheney has a second term, see if they do not
institute some currency expatriation control. See if that doesn't come
in the way Nixon tried it in May-June of 1971.
In the second term, there will be some sort of currency expatriation
control in the United States, but there will also be loopholes that
will allow the large money to escape. The restrictions will apply to
the 10- and 20-thousand-dollar people. It ain't going to apply to the
10- and 20-million-dollar people. It would be self-defeating to do
that.
When that day comes, in other words, when the U.S. Treasury declares a
force majeure on debt, it wouldn't be broad-cast on mainstream media.
There's no sense because the American people don't even understand
what it means. But the announcement would actually be put on the
Federal Reserve wire system, which would, of course, immediately be
picked up by all media outlets anyway.
The U.S. Treasury would declare a force majeure on debt after the
Asian and European markets closed, probably at 12:30 p.m. EDT. The
reason why that hour was always selected is because Asian and European
markets close. It's also the lunch hour for the markets. It's when
you're going to have the fewest people on the floor of the exchanges.
That would be the ideal time to make such an announcement.
A few seconds after that announcement was made, all United States
markets, both equities debt and commodities i.e., stock, bonds,
commodities, that have trading collars or permissible daily limits
would all be limit-offered with pools. Limit-offered means that there
are more sellers at the limit i.e., limit down, than there are buyers.
So-called 'pools' would immediately begin to form, probably a thousand
contracts every few minutes. 'Limit-offered with pools' - this is
trader language. Pools to sell 2,000 lots, 3,000 lots. That means, the
number of sellers over and above the available buyers at the limit-
offered price. That would begin to build.
By 1:00, the news would begin to sink in because it would take awhile
before panic selling would arise from the public. This news is being
released at lunch hour.
A lot of the American people initially would not even understand the
temerity of the news. You would see professional selling first, and as
that professional selling intensified over the afternoon, the SEC, the
CFTC, NASDAQ, and various market regulatory authorities would begin to
institute certain emergency market protocols. This would be the
installation of the so-called 'declaration of fast market conditions,'
for instance; the declaration of 'no more stop orders,' the
declaration of 'fill at any price,' etc. in a desperate bid to
maintain liquidity.
That first day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and related indices
on a percentage basis would lose about 20% of their value by the close
of business that day. The real impact would come overnight when the
American people found out what this was all about and when it was
explained to them.
At 7:30 a.m. EDT, the Tokyo markets would open, and no price would be
affixed for probably three or four hours into the session due to the
avalanche of selling. Once prices were established, the government of
Japan would close all of its financial markets. Europe would not even
open. All European governments would close all capital exchanges the
next day.
The United States would, in order to accommodate global electronic
trading, attempt to open the market on the second day, which they
would do, regardless of price, just to maintain some liquidity. At the
end of Day Two, the Dow Jones and related indices, would have lost two
thirds of their value, and prices would be set accordingly.
On Day Three, the New York Stock Exchange, the SEC and other related
agencies would recommend to the United States Treasury and the Federal
Reserve that all markets be closed. That would be on the morning of
Day Three. Eleven a.m., the Federal Reserve would then order all
domestic banks closed. All of the twelve Federal Reserve district
banks would (30 minutes later) have special U.S. forces parachuted in
and around them to secure whatever gold bullion reserves they had
left.
Day Three, 9:00 p.m., the President of the United States would declare
a state of martial law. All financial transactions would come to an
end. The Treasury would act to formally de-monetize the U.S. dollar
and declare it worthless.
This would be totally unprecedented. In the past, collapses have been
temporary and have been brought back up. But what we're talking about
now is the end.
These protocols that I'm referring to aren't even all that secret.
They were publicly available all through the Clinton era. These are
Treasury protocols that were instituted mostly in the late 1970s when
the Treasury and Federal Reserve began to feel that it was important
to have an emergency-collapse protocol in place.
What precipitated the timing of this was the inflationary spiral of
the late 1970s. The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve were both
concerned that this inflationary spiral, which was occurring not only
domestically but globally, might lead to a global, uncontrollable
hyper-inflation that the Federal Reserve or major central banks could
not stop by traditional means, i.e., by raising interest rates and
contracting money supply.
There was also the recognition, of course, that global central reserve
bank bullion inventories had been so depleted over the previous 30
years that any re-institution of a species currency, even on a
temporary basis, and even within a regional or individual nation-state
basis, was no longer possible.
This is an analogy. In a military scenario, it's like the President of
the United States pushing the final red button -- the commit button.
The Treasury Secretary of the United States has a similar mechanism.
It's called the yellow button, the commit button. The Secretary of
Defense has the same system. This is what happens. Computer program
starts to institute these protocols. Imagine the complexity of trying
the manage all this. I think it's going to happen all simultaneously.
There are hundreds of different agencies involved, both domestically
and internationally. In order to maintain liquidity for as long as
possible, it has to be extremely well-coordinated, and there must be
existing collapse protocols that can be used.
The reason I was familiar with them was because I used to see the U.S.
Treasury 6900 Series Collapse Protocol, 6903, 6904 there'll be A, B,
and so on which keyed in to the Department of Defense to be
incorporated within the Department of Defense's own World War III
scenario and various types of military/ political/ social instability/
war/ pestilence, chaos, etc. scenarios.
All federal agencies had individual collapse protocols that ultimately
got coordinated through the Department of Defense. Obviously, the
Department of Defense would be the ultimate coordinator because it
would need to have special forces available, on a stand-by basis,
ready, that could quickly parachute into areas all over the country,
into the cities particularly, to secure federal properties and assets.
And that's literally how it would begin. By the end of the third day,
it would be all over -- a state of martial law. We're not talking
about war, now; this is just economic collapse.
There's no military implication here, no political, no social
implication or policy directive thereunto. This is strictly economic
collapse. By the end of Day Three, effectively, all banks in the world
will be shut down, all paper currencies will become valueless. Martial
law would be declared. There would be no continuing transactions, at
least for a period of time, of commodities. All providers of fuels and
foods would be shut down automatically.
They have this in great detail too. U.S. Department of Defense Special
117th Assault Unit would parachute in to seize control of the cattle
yards in Oklahoma City. This is how well it's planned. In other words,
economic collapse would automatically involve expansive military
action and control.
By the end of the third day, when you no longer have a domestic medium
of exchange, you have to have secured food and fuel stocks. You've got
to have troops that have secured distribution points where there is
food and fuel stocks, warehouses, tanks, etc. Otherwise people are
just going to go get them, and the people have to know that if they
try to go break into that store and steal that loaf of bread, they're
going to be shot.
Protocols for environmental disasters are called 'scaling-circle
scenarios.' 'Scaling circles' is a Department of Defense euphemism.
It's also used in FEMA, OEM and other emergency management services.
In environmental catastrophes, which are going to become national or
global, it's got to start someplace. It's going to start in one very
small, specific area. Therefore what happens is that the immediate
force containment is the greatest in the first circle, to try to
contain the spread of the disaster and keep it within that circle.
The environmental problem, to whatever extent it's possible, before it
spreads, will be neutralized or mitigated, in order to keep that
catastrophe within that circle, or, if it is likely that it is to
escape that circle, to attack whatever it is in such a fashion as to
mitigate its strength and its ability to contaminate or otherwise
affect other areas.
In the case of earthquakes, for instance, affecting the west coast,
beginning at Mt. Rainier and moving southward -- that's a different
type of scenario. That does not include as much Department of Defense
involvement. It includes separate protocols, wherein mostly FEMA and
OEM act as the senior coordinating agencies between municipal, county
and state disaster and containment, which is called Disaster and
Containment Units. Federal troops would only be brought in for the
purposes of maintaining control.
In a military or economic collapse situation, National Guard units
would provide any spare help they could in combating whatever the
problem is. Federal troops would be used in order to have the specific
authority simply to shoot anyone. There are plans for all sorts of
scenarios. The economic-disaster scenario is the one I always found
the most intriguing because it is the one that is least understood by
the American people.
Military control would be necessary when lines begin to form at the
banks, people trying to access their money. But that wasn't even
anticipated as a big problem. Lines would form at the banks, but it
was not even envisioned until sometime on Day Three because the
American people wouldn't get it. It would be announced that the stock
markets are down 2000 or 3000 points, and since we've always been
taught they'll come back, the people would still be buying stocks.
You could count on everybody remaining in ignorance all the way down
because the American people have never been taught Economics 101. The
American people wouldn't realize the full extent of it until the
markets were closed on the third day, or until the time when they went
down to cash a check and the bank was closed with soldiers out in
front. Then they would go down and see the gas station's closed. They
see the local supermarket has been shuttered, and there's federal
troops in front of it. Then they might begin to catch on. And remember
-- it's not just federal troops. In emergency-collapse protocols, even
before the declaration of a formal state of emergency or a state of
martial law, the local military authorities within any given county or
jurisdiction have the ability to essentially militarize anyone, that
is, any civilian. This would be more than just deputizing civilians.
It's federal. In other words, they would have the ability to
militarize and give military authority to a civilian force. This would
include not only police and the sheriffs and state police, but all
local law enforcement that exists below the state level would be
immediately militarized. They wouldn't take just anybody like they did
in Iraq. It would be like the military when they call for volunteers.
Then they'd have everybody and their brother-in-law volunteering,
waving around the American flag and so on.
You've got a lot of pickup-driving guys in this country with the gun
racks in the back and the Confederate flag flying. So you start waving
the American flag in front of their face and say, Hey, you're going to
get your chance you always wanted -- to fit your potbelly inside an
army uniform and carry a gun and shoot people. How appealing would
that be?
And besides, if you do this, then you're going to get to eat.
In other words, this is how it would unfold over three days, but, in
fact, very few Americans would know what to do about it or how to take
any precautions. They wouldn't have a clue because they don't
understand enough about economics to know what is happening. So that's
what it is -- Economic Armageddon. If the Bush-Cheney regime is re-
installed into power, that is effectively what Comptroller General
David Walker is saying.
In conclusion, since there is very little the people of the United
States can do to protect themselves. We're not going to make any
suggestions of how to protect yourselves because there's very little
you can do.
We could tell you to go out and buy gold coins and bury them in the
coffee can in the back yard and go to your nearest survivalist store,
but, frankly, that's useless. In the last analysis, it's a lot of
hype. There is very little the average US citizen could do.
The only thing that can prevent this, as the Comptroller alluded to
when he was asked by Barbara Walters, How do we prevent reaching the
problem by 2009? He said simply, "A change of regimes."
So how do you prevent it? Don't vote for Bush and Cheney -- and hope
that Bush does not use his emergency powers to cancel or postpone the
election by edict, powers which you, the flag-waving citizens, have
given him.
All flag-waving citizens, be warned. If you want to vote for Bush-
Cheney again, make sure you got plenty of Spam on hand.
Here's an interesting and humorous aside. A couple of days ago, Hormel
Foods, which makes Spam, announced that in the last six months there
have been record sales of Spam in the United States the survivalists'
food of choice. After all, they pride themselves on the fact, as the
spokesman for Hormel said, "It is the only food product you can buy
with an expiration that's 50 years."
When everything goes to hell, when all that man has created has turned
to dust again, the final legacy is going to be Spam. It will be the
last surviving item -- when the anthropologists of 20 thousand years
from now are digging sites and they see these enormous mountains of
unopened cans of Spam They'll have monuments to the past out of Spam.
So if Bush-Cheney has a second term in office, there will be some sort
of currency restriction, like Nixon did in 1971. On April 13, 2004,
Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary John Boine talked about potential
currency restrictions. He used the word that's going to fuel the
flames of the survivalist and gloom-and-doom collapse people.
It's very, very telling that the U.S. Treasury may institute a
restriction on the amount of U.S. dollars that can be converted into
gold.
Furthermore, he intimated (and I suspected that this was coming,
although this wouldn't actually become law until Bush-Cheney was in
office for second term one way or another) that the Bush-Cheney regime
determines that the Gold Confiscation Act gives to Treasury the power
for so-called forced disclosure of gold holdings.
I'm not quite sure of the language of the Gold Confiscation Act from
1933. It just says, "compelled", as in citizens are lawfully compelled
to redeem gold for script. I don't think there was any such provision,
which he was inferring that there is. That was FDR's "Raw Deal" of
1934, when people were coerced into giving up their gold. But nowhere
in this act does it specifically authorize the Treasury to mandate
citizens to report their gold holdings. So if this gets any press at
all, particularly within the circles of gold bugs and so on, watch
out.
Furthermore, on Washington Journal they were talking about how FEMA
has recommended to the Office of Homeland Security to have increased
restrictions regarding citizen hoarding of long-term food and fuel
supplies. That's pretty sinister too.
What they're talking about is the purchase of long-term so-called
stores of survival food. FEMA was talking about some sort of
restriction preventing people from accumulating food stores; putting
it simply, that's what it means. The second point was to increase
restrictions that already exist.
FEMA was recommending even tighter restrictions on citizens building
their own private property underground storage tanks for the purposes
of long-term storage of fuel. The real intent of this is is threefold:
a) to restrict citizens' ability to hoard food; b) restrict citizens'
ability to hoard long-term storage of fuel; c) the forced
identification of citizens to reveal food and fuel stocks they may be
hoarding.
And that, in my opinion, is the real essence. The Bush-Cheney regime
was scared of having the FEMA angle put into the equation because they
knew what it means and how people would interpret it.
They have tried to use environmental legislation to restrict people's
ability to build fuel storage facilities on their own property -- to
get around what the true intent of that was.
But the bigger picture is that if you start to limit citizens' ability
to hoard fuel and food and shake them up by potential forced
identification of gold holdings or forced redemption.
In other words, what you don't want is citizens who have the ability
to store a lot of food and fuel and to own gold because they would be
able to resist state control in the future.
You've got to have every citizen on a rationing card to control the
civilian population. You can't have citizens out there hoarding food
and fuel because then people can say to government,"I ain't taking a
rationing card, baby, with my national ID card. I don't have to. You
can't control me through food and fuel and ever-worthless paper
currency."
I used to make fun of these people. But now, things have come full
circle on this debate. The Bush-Cheney regime is making it
increasingly clear through their small changes in policy. Not a lot of
people monitor these decisions, but I do. And the pattern is becoming
increasingly clear.
In fact, I would believe that those of the survivalist mentality (the
food, fuel, the gold coins in the coffee can in the back yard) people
who think that way will be ultimately vindicated - if George Bush has
a second term in office.
People should quit making fun of them because they would be vindicated
- even though they were all burned out, twenty-dollared to death,
buying books and tapes, and discredited by mainstream media. It may
sound like a hollow victory, but it won't be a hollow victory for them
- them that's got the Spam...

Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

BOOK FORUM
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow)
Featuring the author, Timothy P. Carney, Lobbying Editor, Washington Examiner; with comments by Uwe Reinhardt, James Madison Professor of Political Economy, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; and Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist. Moderated byMichael F. Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies, Cato Institute.
The Cato Institute
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Washington, DC 20001

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Are Big Business and Big Government enemies? According to journalist and author Tim Carney, that story is a myth. Both Republicans and Democrats bilk taxpayers to benefit their corporate allies and K Street lobbyists, whether the issue is health care reform, climate change, or defense spending. The Obama administration's bailouts and "stimulus" package(s) have taken the taxpayer-bilking to historic levels–a remarkable achievement, considering the previous administration. And at the same time the president promises his health care overhaul will put patients first, the legislation he supports has corporate lobbyists once again lined up at the trough.

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Planning for an EU-USA Common Market

Bill Hahn
JBS
Wednesday February 13, 2008

The Transatlantic Policy Network seeks EU-style integration for the European Union and the USA by 2015.
Follow this link to the original source: "Creating a Transatlantic Common Market"
Even with all of the recent attention given to the North American Union (NAU) and its deep integration of trade markets in Canada, Mexico and the USA, it seems another effort at trade integration is underway. This time the plan is for greater integration of the European Union and the United States, and much like the Security and Prosperity Partnership of the NAU, the Transatlantic Union (TAU) is being quietly created.
According to an exclusive at TheNewAmerican.com, a little known NGO (non governmental organization) called the Transatlantic Policy Network, has been working behind the scenes to advance plans to merge the United States with Europe. The article states, "Working carefully, if quietly, since the early 1990s, the organization has moved quickly to gain the agreement of leaders on both sides of the ocean that further integration is necessary and desirable. Now, the organization is much closer to achieving its goals than anyone would suspect."
(Article continues below)


A paper published early last year by the organization entitled, "Completing the Transatlantic Market," states: "It is time for a complementary, top down approach to transatlantic cooperation through a joint commitment by the European Union and the United States to a roadmap for achieving a Transatlantic Market by 2015 and creation of an overarching framework for dialogue and action to achieve that goal."
The big difference between the NAU and the TAU is that Congress has already passed legislation embracing the TAU concept. H. Res. 390 was passed in late 2003 and states that the "United States and the European community are aware of their shared responsibility, not only to further transatlantic security, but to address other common interests such as environmental protection, poverty reduction, combating international crime and promoting human rights, and to work together to meet those transnational challenges which affect the well-being of all." To do this, TheNewAmerican.com points out that laws and regulations would need to be harmonized before any integration could begin.
While Americans were alarmed at this step in the NAU, especially considering how Mexico would need to be brought up to the US and Canada’s standards, we need to be similarly alarmed at the effort to meld the US into a transatlantic common market. Remember that the EU started as a common market that has now morphed into EU citizens not being able to vote on a new constitution, not having local representation (Parliament is forced to regularly travel to Brussels to approve or disapprove a mountain of legislation that they have not seen before) and not having individual national sovereignty for each of the 27 member countries. Rather, all countries are lumped together under a centralized EU bureaucracy.
The political union of Europe did not appear over night, but it did evovle from a European common market. Likewise, the U.S. would not likely undergo a political merger with Europe in the short term. But the natural progression, as demonstrated by the experience of Europe since World War II, is for economic union of the type required for a common market to lead, inexorably, to political union at some point in the future. This is just the sort of entangling alliance the Founding Fathers warned us about. They intended the USA to be independent of Europe. Present day Americans would do well to heed their wisdom.

1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism

1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism

Disillusionment with Woodrow Wilson changed the American Left forever.

22 November 2009

BETTMANN/CORBIS

In 1916, German saboteurs destroyed Black Tom Island in New York Harbor.

Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism. The progressives, led by President Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in reason and the better nature of the American people. Expanded government would serve as an engine of popular goodwill to soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. Describing the condition of his fellow intellectuals prior to World War I, Lewis Mumford exclaimed that “there was scarcely one who did not assume that mankind either was permanently good or might sooner or later reach such a state of universal beatitude.” After the unfortunate Republican interregnum of the 1920s, so the story goes, this progressivism, faced with the Great Depression, matured into the full-blown liberalism of the New Deal.

But a central strand of modern liberalism was born of a sense of betrayal, of a rejection of progressivism, of a shift in sensibility so profound that it still resonates today. More precisely, the cultural tone of modern liberalism was, in significant measure, set by a political love affair gone wrong between Wilson and a liberal Left unable to grapple with the realities of Prussian power. Initially embraced by many leftists as a thaumaturgical leader of near-messianic promise, Wilson came to be seen—in the wake of a cataclysmic war, a failed peace, repression at home, revolution abroad, and a country wracked by a “Red Scare”—as a Judas. His numinous rhetoric, it was concluded, was mere mummery.

One strand of progressives grew contemptuous not only of Wilson but of American society. For the once-ardent progressive Frederick Howe, formerly Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the prewar promise of a benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.”

Making a decisive break with Wilson and their optimism about America, the disenchanted progressives renamed themselves “liberals.” The progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics; the new liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom both at home and abroad.

Wilson, a devout Presbyterian and former college professor, was the first and probably the only president to have studied socialism systematically. In 1887, as a young man, he responded to the growth of vast industrial monopolies that threatened individual freedom by arguing that “in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.” In the 1912 presidential race, he said that “when you do socialism justice, it is hardly different from the heart of Christianity itself.” Four years later, he brushed aside intense opposition to appoint two pro-labor-union justices to the Supreme Court and backed railroad workers in their fight for an eight-hour day. The president imposed a surtax on the wealthy and won the support of such prominent socialists as Upton Sinclair and Helen Keller.

For many on the left, Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” opened the way for the emergence of a more vibrant American culture. The war in Europe seemed far away, and progressives were for the moment imbued with an impregnable optimism. The administration’s critique of European power politics and talk of the need for international law gave pacifist Jane Addams “unlimited faith in the president.” When Meyer London, the antiwar socialist congressman from New York’s Lower East Side, and Socialist Party leader Morris Hilquit visited the White House to talk about the prospects for peace in Europe, they came away concluding that Wilson’s “sympathies are entirely with us.” Similarly, as Thomas Knock recounts in his book To End All Wars, after visiting the White House, the leaders of the American Union Against Militarism felt that “the President had taken us into his bosom.” Wilson, they noted, “always referred to the Union Against Militarism as though he were a member of it” and talked about the need to create “a family of nations.”

The courtship between Wilson and the leftists was nurtured by the hard fought 1916 presidential election. Wilson faced a Republican Party that had recovered from a 1912 split between Teddy Roosevelt’s breakaway Bull Moose progressives and anti-reform regulars to coalesce around Supreme Court Justice Charles Evan Hughes. As war raged in Europe, the incumbent narrowly won by bringing sizable numbers of Bull Moosers (who admired Germany’s proto-welfare state) and Eugene Debs’s Socialists into his “peace camp.”

Even after the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, pushed by Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and the public revelation of the Kaiser’s plans for an alliance with Mexico to reconquer the Southwest, Wilson maintained his strong ties with the largely antiwar Left. The very speech in which he asked for a congressional declaration of war also welcomed the Russian revolution that had overthrown the czar and put the socialist Alexander Kerensky (temporarily) in power. Wilson effusively, if inaccurately, described the revolution as the fulfillment of the Russian people’s long struggle for democracy, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing declared that it “had removed the one objection to affirming that the European War was a war between Democracy and Absolutism.” Some progressives even backed America’s entry. The progressive animus toward corrupt and overmighty party bosses and autocratic monarchists was “readily transferred to an overbearing Kaiser and a hegemonic war machine,” notes historian Morton Keller.

Wilson insisted on referring to the United States not as an ally of England and France but as an “associated power,” and he made a point of keeping U.S. forces strictly under American command, rankling the British and French, whom he regarded as imperialists. Eight months later, shortly after Lenin had taken power in Russia, Wilson expressed ambivalence about Bolshevism: “My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them.” Yet Wilson’s “Fourteen Points, his message of good luck to the ‘republic of labor unions’ in Russia . . . his warning to the Allied powers that their treatment of Bolshevik Russia would be the ‘acid test’ of their ‘good will . . . intelligence and unselfish sympathy’: these moves were immensely impressive to us,” explained magazine editor Max Eastman, speaking for many leftists and progressives. Indeed, when Russian War Commissar Leon Trotsky coined the now famous concept of the “fellow traveler,” he was referring to Wilson. Trotsky sensed that the American president shared the Bolsheviks’ hatred of European imperialism, and he thought that Soviet Russia and a reformed America would travel on parallel tracks into a brighter future.

While Wilson increasingly spoke of international comity, relations between ethnic groups within the United States were breaking down. The Kaiser’s aggression in Eastern Europe prompted pitched battles between Germans and Slavs in the streets of Chicago. At the same time, nearly half a million Germans in America returned home to fight for the fatherland. Charles John Hexamer, president of the National German-American Alliance, financed in part by the German government, insisted that Germans needed to maintain their separate identity and not “descend to the level of an inferior culture.” Germans even began attacking that inferior culture. The most important instance of German domestic sabotage was the spectacular explosion on Black Tom Island in the summer of 1916, which shook a sizable swath of New York City and New Jersey. The man-made peninsula in New York Harbor was a key storage and shipping point for munitions sold to the British and French. The bombing sank the peninsula into the sea, killed seven, and damaged the Statue of Liberty. Wilson denounced Germany’s supporters in America: “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”

The government responded with repression, as journalist Ann Hagedorn chronicles in Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America. Under the Sedition Act of 1918, people were sentenced to 10 years in prison for saying that they preferred the Kaiser to Wilson; others were jailed for mocking salesmen of Liberty Bonds, which supported the war effort. Most famously, socialist leader Debs was jailed for criticizing conscription.

Wilson placed George Creel, a journalist, socialist, and strong supporter of child labor laws and women’s suffrage, in charge of ensuring home-front morale through the Committee for Public Information. But the Committee, which Creel described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising,” wildly overshot its mark, encouraging the banning of everything German, from Beethoven to sauerkraut to teaching the German language. The Justice Department and the attorney general, Thomas Gregory, encouraged local vigilantism against Germans, giving the American Protective League, a quarter-of-a-million-strong nativist organization, semi-official status to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The League went out of its way to break up labor strikes as well, while branding its critics Reds.

Responding to the League’s excesses, Wilson declared that he’d “rather the blamed place should be blown up than persecute innocent people.” But in the next breath he said, “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way.” Despite his misgivings, Wilson deferred to Gregory’s judgment and refrained from taking action against extremists. Only after the armistice ended the war in November 1918 did Wilson, heeding the advice of incoming attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, move to end government cooperation with the League. But by now, the disparity between Wilson’s call for extending liberty abroad and the suppression of liberty at home had become a running sore for disenchanted progressives.

The armistice largely ended the fighting in Europe, but it opened a new chapter in hostilities at home: the Red Scare. Back in March, the Bolsheviks’ effectively unconditional surrender to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk had created a cat’s cradle of anticommunist fear intertwined with hostility to the Huns. Germany got control of the Baltic states, Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, with their attendant coal and oil resources—freeing the Kaiser’s army to focus on the Western front, to deadly effect. Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 by way of a sealed railroad car supplied by Berlin was now seen as proof, and not only by conspiratorialists, that the Bolshevik leader was a German agent.

Progressives and leftists, counseled by Raymond Robbins, who had worked for Wilson in 1912 and served as an unofficial ambassador to the Bolsheviks, adopted a counter-conspiracy ethos that persists even today. Smitten by Bolshevism, Robbins wrote to Lenin that “it has been my eager desire . . . to be of some use in interpreting this new democracy to the people of America.” Robbins also mistakenly blamed the U.S. for forcing Lenin to agree to Germany’s harsh terms at Brest-Litovsk. Over the next several years, explains historian Peter Filene, Robbins’s efforts helped shape the views of many American progressives. They became enraged when Wilson gave in to pressure from France and England, both suffering enormous casualties on the western front, and provided half-hearted American military support to a campaign that tried to force the Bolsheviks back into the war. Filene points out that for progressives, the “betrayal” of which most Americans accused the Bolsheviks was actually an American perfidy.

Here too, Wilson, juggling principle and practicality, proved strikingly inconstant. In the words of German scholar George Schild, “the Wilson who agreed to the Allied intervention [against the Soviets] in the summer of 1918” and the Wilson who just one year later in Paris helped save the Soviet Union by insisting that the Germans relinquish their conquests on the eastern front “almost seem like two different people.” Faced with the Soviet challenge and bearing the new ideology of universal democracy, Wilson floated the idea that the Bolsheviks should be invited to the peace conference. (Churchill blocked the suggestion.) Wilson the progressive argued that “war won’t defeat Bolshevism, food will.” Capitalism, Wilson argued, had to reform itself to stave off Bolshevik barbarism.

Wilson’s efforts to reconstruct Europe would largely fail, not only because the U.S. refused to join the League of Nations, but because the task at hand was undoable; what the war had sundered could not be put back together. Many former Wilson supporters were angry and disillusioned with the meager fruits of a war that had failed to make the world safe for democracy. But those feelings were shared widely across the political spectrum. Those who were soon to call themselves liberals were particularly provoked by wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, and the wildly overwrought fears of Bolshevism at home.

Already in 1918, when the war was still raging, labor unions, emboldened by a surge in membership and squeezed by an inflation-triggered decline in living standards, had engaged in a wave of strikes, some of them repressed by the American Protective League, local police forces, and agents of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Walkouts led by the Industrial Workers of the World, known for work sabotage, seemed particularly ominous. IWW members, known as Wobblies, sometimes described themselves as Lenin’s advance guard. At the end of the year, in the wake of the armistice, New York mayor John Hylan banned the socialist red flag at public gatherings, and shortly thereafter a socialist rally at Madison Square Garden was broken up by 500 soldiers and sailors. The bad blood endured. On the first anniversary of the war’s end, American Legionnaires and Wobblies clashed in Centralia, Washington. Six Wobblies were killed.

Every strike, confrontation, and racial incident was taken, on both left and right, as a manifestation of Bolshevism. Every challenge to the existing social order, no matter how justified, wound up attributed to the red menace. African-Americans’ so-called “uppityness”—insufficient deference to whites—was blamed on homegrown Bolshevism and met with lynchings and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. White attacks on blacks set off black riots in Chicago and Washington that federal troops were called in to suppress.

The Red Scare intensified in June 1919, when Attorney General Palmer was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb planted in his Georgetown home. Bombs went off in seven other cities the same night. The bombers were probably from the Galleanisti group of Italian anarchists, which included the as-yet unknown Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, notes Beverley Gage in The Day Wall Street Exploded. But the Russian Bolsheviki were seen as responsible, reigniting the intense, hysterical nationalism of the war years. Palmer, who subsequently claimed to have a list of 60,000 subversives, engaged in a series of warrantless raids aimed at capturing the mostly immigrant red radicals, some of whom were jailed or shipped back to Russia. With no reproach from Wilson, Palmer trampled on civil liberties and harassed the innocent as well as the likely guilty. Then came the famed Wall Street bombing of September 1920, which claimed the lives of 38 New Yorkers and injured 400; like the Palmer attack, it was probably perpetrated by the Galleanisti anarchists, but the Bolsheviks again took the blame.

An aggressive nationalism and an accelerated Americanization became political twins. Both demanded something that, with the partial exception of the Civil War North, had never before existed in America—a coherent, irrefragable governmental power. In Europe, war had become bound up with revolution; in the U.S., the war, together with the Bolshevik challenge, called up the seemingly un-American concept of a General Will—a 100 percent Americanism that brooked no opposition. Progressives’ disenchantment with America intensified.

Even Prohibition contributed to progressives’ growing sense of estrangement from the country. Before the war, progressives had broadly supported Prohibition as a means to protect working-class families from the economic depredations of drink. But after the war, the emerging liberals were disturbed by what they saw as cultural continuation of wartime repression. “Like most sensible people,” shouted liberal Harold Stearns, “I regard prohibition as an outrage and a direct invitation to revolution.”

The silver lining of the wartime-spawned repression was that it laid the groundwork for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment that would eventually extend free-speech rights to individuals harassed not only by the federal government but by states and localities as well. The strongest section of Hagedorn’s Savage Peace deals with the key case in advancing this new understanding. Jacob Abrams, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a bookbinder, had printed anarchist leaflets in English and Yiddish and dropped them from buildings on New York’s Lower East Side. The pamphlets bitterly denounced Wilson’s cooperating with England and France in trying to force Russia’s government back into the war against Germany. Zealous prosecutors saw the leaflets as violations of the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to undermine American wartime policy. Abrams, sentenced to 20 years in jail, would eventually be deported.

In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld Abrams’s conviction. But in his dissent, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, while agreeing that “speech that produces or is intended to produce a clear andimminent danger” can be prosecuted, maintained that he saw no such danger in Abrams’s leaflets, which he described as “silly” writings by an “unknown man.” Holmes’s underlying reasoning would prove extraordinarily influential. Like John Stuart Mill, Holmes found that a maximum of free speech was essential for a successful society. America, he argued, had an interest in discovering truth available only through “the marketplace of ideas,” where competing viewpoints are compelled to make their best case.

Palmer had hoped to ride the Red Scare into the White House. But within a year the amiable, if ineffectual, Warren G. Harding of Ohio was ensconced in Washington, along with his card-playing cronies. The crusade that had ended abroad was brought to a close at home. Harding released Debs from prison and returned America to what he dubbed “normalcy.”

For intellectuals and writers who had anticipated utopia in 1916, however, the postwar years brought anger and intensified alienation. The war, said writer Floyd Dell, had produced a generation of young minds “trained in disillusion.” They felt betrayed by Wilson, who had not only suppressed civil liberties but had tried to force Russia back into the war and made compromises with European imperialism at Versailles. They disdained a society that had supported both the Red Scare and Prohibition. In the words of an influential young liberal, “we crushed German militarism only to find that we ourselves had adopted many of its worst features.”

Literary critic Malcolm Cowley spoke for many intellectuals in the wake of the war: “We believed that we had fought for an empty cause, that the Germans were no worse than the Allies, no better, that the world consisted of fools and scoundrels.” Critic Harold Stearns, in his seminal 1919 book Liberalism in America, asserted bitterly that “in Soviet countries there is no fact of freedom of the press and no pretense that there is. In America today there is in fact no freedom of the press and we only make the matter worse by pretending that there is.” The state, said the soured progressive Frederick Howe, “seemed to want to hurt people; it showed no concern for innocence. . . . It was not my America, it was something else.”

What followed was not so much protest as simmering scorn. In 1919, the Germanophile H. L. Mencken, writing in The New Republic, called sarcastically for honoring the civilian heroes who had suppressed Beethoven by bedizening them with bronze badges and golden crosses. Mencken ridiculed the mass of Americans who had backed “Wilson’s War,” branding them a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob”; a great admirer of Kaiser Wilhelm, he denigrated American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses.” Taking its cues from Mencken, the liberalism that emerged from 1919 was contemptuous of American culture and politics. For liberals, the war years had shown that American society and democracy were themselves agents of repression. These sentiments deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.

The new liberal ethos was not without its virtues. In picking their fights with Prohibition and their former hero Wilson, liberals encouraged the sense of tolerance and appreciation of differences that would, over time, mature into what came to be called pluralism. “The root of liberalism,” wrote Stearns, “is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys.” Though not always observed by liberals themselves, the call for an urbane temper would come to mark liberalism at its best.

The underside of this new sensibility was an inverted moralism and a quasi-aristocratic hauteur that has dogged political liberalism down to the present day. “Something oppressed” the liberals, wrote Cowley in 1934; “some force was preventing them from doing their best work.” At the time, that “something” was “the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization; or perhaps it was the Machine.” As this current carried into the 1950s, what oppressed the liberals became affluence, suburbia, two-car garages, and backyard barbecues.

Most recently, the liberal plaint has been taken up by the aging but affluent “68ers,” who supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign because they saw themselves as victims of American society. If they had lived to see it, their progenitors of 1919 would have smiled in recognition.

Fred Siegel is a contributing editor to City Journal and a visiting professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon1122fs.html

Las redes sociales como herramienta de análisis estructural input-output

Ana Salomé García Muñiz[1]

Carmen Ramos Carvajal

Universidad de Oviedo- Departamento de Economía Aplicada

Abstract

Uno de los aspectos fundamentales que posibilita el conocimiento en profundidad de una economía es la realización de un análisis de su estructura productiva. Dicho análisis supone una importante ayuda no sólo en la toma de decisiones de política económica, sino también constituye un requisito indispensable y previo a las tareas de predicción necesarias en un contexto empresarial.

El estudio de una economía puede abordarse desde muy diversas ópticas, una de las cuales es el enfoque input-output, el cual permite analizar conjuntamente las relaciones intersectoriales de una economía y su demanda agregada, con lo cual se dispone de un conocimiento integrado de la actividad económica.

Consideramos la teoría de redes como una importante “herramienta”, a nuestro juicio poco explotada en el ámbito económico, que constituye un marco general de estudio dentro del cual podemos encuadrar el análisis input-output. Esta teoría permite simplificar el esquema de relaciones surgido entre los sectores de una economía y, por lo tanto, favorecer la comprensión del mismo. El objetivo del presente trabajo es analizar las relaciones interindustriales bajo la óptica de la teoría de las redes sociales y, al mismo tiempo, efectuar una comparación entre los resultados así obtenidos y los que se derivan de la aplicación de los métodos input-output clásicos.

1. Introducción

El análisis input-output es una importante herramienta en los estudios de economía y, en particular, de economía regional, ya que permite un conocimiento integrado de la misma al proporcionar información no sólo de las relaciones existentes entre los distintos sectores, sino también sobre su demanda agregada. El esquema contable recogido en toda tabla input-output refleja las interdependencias en la estructura productiva analizada a través del conjunto de relaciones intersectoriales consideradas.

El modelo clásico input-ouput de Leontief (1951) se ha empleado habitualmente en el análisis de la estructura de una economía, posibilitando la realización de simulaciones y predicciones sobre impactos externos en la estructura económica. La comprensión a partir del mismo de las relaciones intersectoriales, entendidas como flujos de producción, ha constituido, además, uno de los pilares en los estudios de localización de ejes de crecimiento, necesarios en la planificación de toda política industrial coordinada.

A pesar de sus conocidas limitaciones (Uriel, 1997; Muñoz, 1994, Pulido y Fontela, 1993) existe un consenso generalizado sobre el adecuado comportamiento de los coeficientes clásicos de Chenery y Watanabe, Rasmussen o Streit, para el estudio de las transacciones intersectoriales y su interdependencia dentro de la estructura productiva en cuestión. Estas medidas aplicadas tradicionalmente[2] permiten obtener una visión general de la economía regional o nacional, ya que informan sobre las relaciones directas e indirectas entre las ramas de actividad perfilando los sectores claves en el funcionamiento del entramado económico.

Frente a esta óptica clásica de análisis, planteamos en este trabajo una alternativa, cuanto menos enriquecedora, de estudio del marco input-output. Un nuevo enfoque basado en un instrumento, a nuestro juicio poco explotado aún en el ámbito económico, como es la teoría de redes sociales. Es apenas hace diez años, en torno a los años noventa, cuando los economistas han empezado a emplear esta técnica “conscientemente”[3] en sus estudios de mercado (Rauch y Casella, 2001).

Este trabajo es un primer paso de un estudio más ambicioso, en el que pretendemos reformular el análisis estructural input-output a partir de la teoría de redes sociales.

La aplicación de esta teoría en el ámbito del análisis input-output presenta un gran potencial al integrar en su desarrollo cuestiones tan relevantes como las posiciones relativas de los sectores, su orientación o los senderos por donde circula la influencia económica dentro de la estructura considerada. Permite, por lo tanto, una notable simplificación del esquema de relaciones intersectoriales, ventajas que apenas han sido aprovechadas aún en este marco. Consideramos el trabajo de Morillas (1983), en el que se analizan las relaciones intersectoriales a partir de la teoría de grafos, como el antecedente de la aplicación de la disciplina de las redes sociales.

En este documento ofrecemos una alternativa a los indicadores clásicos (coeficientes de Rasmussen, Chenery-Watanabe y Streit, entre otros) en el estudio de ramas clave en la economía. Bajo la óptica de las redes, la determinación de la posición de los sectores en la estructura económica a través de medidas de centralidad, establecerá la influencia e importancia de los mismos en la configuración de las transacciones bajo un nuevo enfoque.

A continuación, se plantea tras la especificación de la red económica considerada, unos indicadores de centralidad sobre la estructura analizada y sus similitudes o divergencias con las medidas tradicionales. Se concluye con un breve resumen de los resultados obtenidos.

2. Una tabla input-output como una red de relaciones intersectoriales

El concepto de red social es sencillo, consiste en un conjunto de actores entre los que se establece una serie de vínculos. Pueden estar constituidas por un número más o menos amplio de actores y una o más clases de relaciones entre pares de elementos. En palabras de R. Hanneman[4]:

Para entender acertadamente una red social es necesario realizar una descripción completa y rigurosa de la estructura de sus relaciones como punto de partida para el análisis.

En el análisis de una red se considera la estructura de las relaciones en las que cada actor se encuentra involucrado, es más, estos actores se describen a través de sus conexiones, las cuales se muestran tan relevantes como ellos mismos.

El estudio de una red social se efectúa fundamentalmente a partir de dos grandes grupos de técnicas estrechamente relacionadas: la teoría de grafos y la teoría de matrices. Ambas permiten representar y describir una red de una manera sistemática y, por lo tanto, posibilitarán una más sencilla aproximación al estudio de las mismas, así como clarificar determinados comportamientos o actitudes.

Una tabla input-output (TIO) es una descripción detallada, en términos monetarios, del proceso productivo y de los flujos de bienes y servicios existentes en un espacio geográfico concreto durante el período de un año. Constituye una matriz en la que se recogen los flujos entre diferentes sectores de una economía, es decir, las compras y ventas entre las distintas ramas. A partir de los valores que aparecen en la tabla se pueden conocer las similitudes y diferencias existentes entre los sectores. Es interesante determinar no sólo la importancia que tiene cada sector en la economía de una región, sino también cómo se relacionan las diferentes ramas productivas a través de los flujos de comercio. Como señala Porter (1987):

(...) aunque el entorno relevante es muy amplio y abarca tanto fuerzas sociales como económicas, el aspecto clave del entorno de la empresa es el sector o sectores industriales en los cuales compite. La estructura de un sector industrial tiene una fuerte influencia al determinar las reglas del juego competitivas así como las posibilidades estratégicas potencialmente disponibles para la empresa.

Dicho análisis implica un conocimiento profundo de las relaciones intersectoriales, esto es, de las denominadas ligazones específicas.

El enfoque de este trabajo y, que a nuestro juicio es novedoso, consiste en tratar las relaciones existentes entre los sectores de una economía, desde la óptica de las redes sociales, por ello consideramos a las ramas productivas como actores y las relaciones entre ellas estarán representadas por los flujos de mercancías. 

Esta aproximación a las relaciones intersectoriales, plantea un esquema más real y completo de su funcionamiento, ya que como sugiere Grannovetter (1985) a través de su teoría de “embeddedness”, toda acción económica no puede ser explicada únicamente a través de móviles individuales, sino que depende también de las relaciones que los individuos mantienen[5]. Siguiendo este razonamiento, la utilización de las redes sociales permite, de forma simplificada, un conocimiento en detalle del esquema de relaciones de un sector con su entorno, el capital social[6] en el cual se desarrolla el entramado de sus estrategias empresariales con el resto de agentes económicos.

La red económica establecida se convierte en un cúmulo de oportunidades y limitaciones que influye sobre el comportamiento de los sectores. En este marco, las propias transacciones de las ramas productivas afectan, consecuentemente, a la toma de decisiones de otros sectores, y como tal, la estructura global se ve también transformada. Existe, en suma, un papel interactivo entre la acción o transacciones empresariales realizadas por las ramas consideradas y la estructura, de tal forma que la estructura emergente de la red también influye en el comportamiento de la empresa (Giddens, 1984). El planteamiento de estas relaciones entre los agentes individuales y la estructura como un todo, permite un análisis detallado de las transacciones económicas a nivel micro y macroeconómico, a través de la metodología de las redes sociales.

3. La consideración de los  sectores clave bajo una doble perspectiva: clásica y de teoría de redes

Un uso común del análisis input-output consiste en establecer qué ramas productivas se consideran como claves, es decir, presentan unos efectos más destacados en el seno del sistema económico regional, cuantificando la intensidad y la relevancia de las ligazones intersectoriales. Con este fin, tradicionalmente, se han venido aplicando los coeficientes de Rasmussen (1956) y Chenery-Watanabe (1958), los cuales a partir de concepto de “eslabonamiento”, introducido por Hirschman (1958) en estudios de desarrollo, permiten agrupar los sectores en cuatro bloques. Para ello, se distinguen los eslabonamientos hacia atrás que se producen cuando una rama productiva utiliza bienes y servicios procedentes de otras; y los eslabonamientos hacia adelante, debidos a que los productos de un sector son utilizados por otros como bienes y servicios en la elaboración de sus productos.

A partir de la teoría de redes sociales es posible profundizar en el conocimiento de la estructura productiva de una región o nación, determinando aquellos sectores claves mediante la consideración de tres rasgos complementarios que amplían y complementan la visión clásica sobre las ramas polarizadoras del crecimiento. Estas características permiten analizar las relaciones interindustriales bajo un triple enfoque: los efectos totales de un sector sobre el conjunto de la economía, la rapidez con que un sector se relaciona con los demás y la importancia de éstos como elementos trasmisores dentro de la red. Dichos aspectos se recogen dentro del concepto genérico de centralidad, característica que permite analizar las propiedades estructurales y de localización de la red económica.

En la teoría de redes se considera un actor como importante, si presenta un mayor número de interrelaciones, bien directas o indirectas,  con el resto de agentes en la red. En este sentido, las ramas productivas que mantienen mayores conexiones gozan de posiciones estructurales más ventajosas en la medida en que presentan un mayor grado relativo de acceso y control sobre los recursos existentes, siendo menos dependientes. A partir de esta noción se identifican los sectores que funcionan en el sistema económico regional a modo de encrucijada, constituyendo elementos conectores cruciales para el funcionamiento e interconexión económica.

Esta óptica de estudio, profundiza y enriquece el conocimiento de la estructura productiva. Plantearemos en este trabajo la determinación de estos rasgos  bien a través de las denominadas medidas de centralidad, y alternativamente con técnicas input-output tradicionales.

Según la metodología de las redes, para detectar aquellos sectores con una posición más relevante dentro de la economía se puede aplicar, siguiendo a Friedkin (1991), tres medidas de centralidad denominadas efectos totales, efectos inmediatos y efectos mediativos.

A pesar de la variedad de indicadores existentes con análoga finalidad[7], su elección se ha basado en la similitud de planteamiento con la metodología clásica input-output, lo cual facilita una posterior comparación.

Dentro de la óptica clásica podemos referirnos a los conocidos coeficientes de Rasmussen que permiten determinar aquellos sectores con unos efectos más importantes sobre el conjunto de  los agentes económicos de la red, tal y como plantean los efectos totales.

Por otro lado, los coeficientes de Streit identifican aquellas ramas más intensamente relacionadas con el sistema económico, lo cual las convierte en actividades productivas fundamentales para la interconexión del funcionamiento de la red.

A continuación se expone por separado la identificación de cada una de las tres características mencionadas, bajo los dos enfoques considerados, la metodología clásica y la nueva óptica de la teoría de las redes sociales.

3.1. Los efectos directos e indirectos

La determinación de la intensidad y relevancia de las transacciones interindustriales, bien directas o indirectas, puede ser estimada a partir de los coeficientes de Rasmussen o de los denominados, dentro de las medidas de centralidad, efectos totales.

3.1.1.  Los coeficientes de Rasmussen

En el modelo de Leontief simplificado[8] los elementos de la denominada matriz inversa de Leontief (I-A)^-1 indican la cuantía en que debe aumentar la producción de un sector i-ésimo para que la demanda final de un sector j-ésimo se incremente en una unidad. A partir de los elementos de esta matriz se pueden obtener coeficientes que recojan la capacidad de generar o absorber crecimiento de los distintos sectores de la economía. Un primer paso en este análisis consiste en considerar las sumas de los elementos de cada fila y columna de dicha matriz, esto es, los denominados efectos absorción (z_i.)  y difusión (z_.j ), respectivamente.

Los coeficientes definidos por Rasmussen (1956) se desarrollan sobre la base de estos efectos difusión y absorción y se obtienen calculando, en primer término, un promedio de dichos efectos en cada una de las ramas, para después expresar cada uno de estos promedios en relación a los efectos globales.

El coeficiente de Rasmussen calculado a partir del efecto difusión y conocido por índice de poder de difusión se define como:

Cuantifica en términos relativos la fuerza con que un sector productivo es capaz de “arrastrar” al conjunto de la economía.

Si nos hubiésemos apoyado en el efecto absorción, habríamos derivado el índice de sensibilidad de absorción cuya expresión, a partir la matriz de coeficientes de distribución[9], es:

Permite medir en términos relativos el impacto que recibe un sector ante un crecimiento del total de ramas.

Sobre la base de estos resultados se establece una clasificación en torno a cuatro categorías.

a)     Los denominados sectores clave de una economía son aquellos que presentan efectos de arrastre hacia adelante y hacia atrás superiores a la media.

b)     Los sectores con efectos de arrastre hacia atrás mayores que la unidad.

c)     Sectores con eslabonamientos hacia adelante sobre la media, ya que una parte elevada de sus productos son vendidos a otras que los utilizan como bienes intermedios generando así ligazones elevadas de oferta.

d)     Los sectores independientes que presentan unos efectos de dispersión y absorción por debajo de la media.

3.1.2.  Los efectos totales

En la teoría de redes sociales, los distintos efectos se determinan a partir de una matriz (A) en la que se recogen las interrelaciones de la red analizada, la cual en el ámbito de nuestro estudio, es la matriz de coeficientes input-output.

Siguiendo a Friedkin (1990), la determinación de los efectos totales intersectoriales está básicamente relacionada con el número y longitud de los caminos existentes entre los distintos sectores a través de las relaciones productivas especificadas, de tal forma que[10]:

0<a<1

donde a es una ponderación de las influencias intersectoriales que permite calibrar la capacidad de influencia entre sectores.

El aumento del número de pasos a través de los cuales dos sectores se pueden interrelacionar supone una disminución del impacto de sus transacciones, mientras que para igualdad de distancias el efecto ocasionado depende de la intensidad o fuerza de las relaciones existentes (aa_ij).

Partiendo del supuesto más sencillo de ausencia de polarización en la toma de decisiones de los agentes económicos y suponiendo que a tiende a la unidad V podría converger, según las características de la matriz, a V_u tal que los efectos totales intersectoriales son constantes[11]:

La base de los efectos totales se podría calcular bajo estas condiciones como[12]:

=V_u

Los efectos totales de un sector j en la red se recogen en la columna j de la matriz V, de tal forma que el efecto total de centralidad, TEC, se define como:

Es decir, se trata del promedio de los elementos de las columnas de la matriz V, de forma que cuanto mayor sea este valor, mayor fuerza tendrán en el sector los efectos totales respecto al conjunto de la economía.

Complementariamente, razonando de forma análoga a partir de la matriz de coeficientes de distribución, se plantearía un indicador sobre los efectos totales de la red sobre un sector i-ésimo:

Cuanto mayor sea, mayor será el efecto recibido por un sector ante cambios en la red.

Es relevante notar que todas las medidas señaladas, tanto las que proceden del enfoque clásico como las derivadas de la teoría de las redes sociales, se obtienen a partir de la matriz inversa de Leontief. Es más, podemos considerar los coeficientes de Rasmussen como un caso particular de los derivados de la teoría de redes, donde no se consideran ponderaciones, es decir, se trata de medidas que no tienen en cuenta el factor a que representa la influencia de los sectores.

También es preciso señalar que mientras el coeficiente de Rasmussen se encuentra normalizado al estar divididos por el total, no ocurre lo mismo con los efectos totales, sin embargo, la interpretación de ambas  medidas es análoga.

De esta forma, queda demostrada la similitud directa entre ambas medidas en el caso más sencillo de ausencia de polarización y ponderación de las influencias intersectoriales tendente a la unidad. En un análisis más detallado se podría plantear la estimación de este coeficiente de influencia social (a), e incluso su diferenciación entre sectores (a_i), con el fin de distinguir la propensión de una rama productiva a las influencias intersectoriales. Quedaría así establecido el patrón de toma de decisiones empresariales junto con sus elementos dinamizadores del sistema económico.

3.2.  La rapidez en la difusión

La rapidez de transmisión de los efectos totales determinados es una característica interesante en la valoración de la implementación de políticas económicas y sus posibles efectos en el tiempo o en su propagación dentro de la red analizada. Este rasgo se determina, siguiendo la terminología de las redes sociales, a partir de los denominados efectos inmediatos y no ha sido considerado en los estudios tradicionales de input-output, por lo que se trata de una aportación neta de la teoría de redes al análisis estructural.

La rapidez de difusión en la red, una vez obtenidos los efectos totales de un sector j, se puede determinar a través de la longitud media de las secuencias de sus transacciones económicas:

donde D es una matriz diagonal con elementos d_ii=1/c_i, E representa una matriz (nxn) unitaria y Z es la denominada matriz fundamental cuya expresión es la que sigue:

tal que A^¥ coincidirá con la matriz V_u la cual, recoge el estado estacionario del proceso analizado (c₁,...,c_n).

Y Z_dg es una matriz diagonal construida a partir de la definición de Z.

La rapidez con que un sector se relaciona económicamente con otros, se expresa en las columnas respectivas de la matriz M. El indicador de estos efectos inmediatos, IEC, se calcula así como el inverso de la media de las longitudes de las relaciones intersectoriales de una rama productiva j:

Donde m_ij son los elementos de la matriz M.

A medida que aumenta el valor de la medida expuesta, mayor será la rapidez con la cual se propaguen los efectos totales del sector considerado.

3.3. Elementos conectores

El último de los tres rasgos que se ha considerado definen un sector económico como clave, hace referencia a la importancia de sectores particulares como instrumentos de transmisión de los efectos totales. Son sectores que facilitan el funcionamiento e interconexión económica, vertebrando la interrelación de las distintas actividades productivas. Tales agentes económicos funcionan en el sistema a modo de encrucijada, constituyendo puntos clave para el desarrollo conjunto de la economía.

La cuantificación de la intensidad de estas transacciones industriales en el sistema económico ha constituido además una de las cuestiones recurrentes en la literatura de economía regional. Su cálculo permite calibrar, los efectos de arrastre en el desarrollo y evolución de la región, de tal forma, que aquellas ramas que aparecen como habitualmente interrelacionadas podrían llegar a formar complejos industriales y establecerse juntas en el espacio.

El estudio de la debilidad o fortaleza de las interrelaciones sectoriales puede ser planteado bajo una doble perspectiva: a través de los tradicionales coeficientes de Streit o bien a partir de los efectos mediativos derivados de la noción de centralidad.

3.3.1.  Coeficientes de Streit

Los coeficientes de Streit (1969) permiten analizar, a partir de la matriz de transacciones intermedias (X´), las relaciones sector a sector determinando el grado de interrelación entre dos ramas cualesquiera. Serán considerados sectores muy vinculados, aquellos a los que van o de los que proceden gran parte de los inputs y outputs mutuamente utilizados.

Con esta finalidad, los indicadores denominados ligazones específicas de oferta (LEO_ij) y de demanda (LED_ij) para los sectores i y j muestran, respectivamente, la proporción en la que la rama i utiliza los productos de la rama j como consumo, o los usos intermedios que la rama j hace de los productos de la rama i con respecto al total de inputs intermedios (Muñoz, 1995):

Cambiando el orden de los subíndices se pueden observar las otras dos relaciones entre el par de sectores analizados, esto es, . 

Este estudio de las ligazones se suele complementar con el cálculo de una medida resumen, formulada a partir de la media aritmética simple de las cuatro ligazones posibles existentes entre dos ramas cualesquiera i y j. Formalmente, los denominados coeficientes simétricos de Streit (CS_ij) toman la expresión siguiente:

Su análisis permite perfilar los sectores productivos relevantes o polarizadores en el funcionamiento del sistema económico, dada su importancia como demandantes de los productos de otras ramas o como suministradores de inputs intermedios necesarios en la producción de otros sectores.

La posterior identificación de aquellos sectores más intensamente relacionados, no ya con otra rama determinada, sino con el conjunto del sistema económico, se estima a través del coeficiente de ligazón global (CSG_i):

Estas ramas intensamente relacionadas, suponen actividades productivas fundamentales para la interconexión del funcionamiento de la economía considerada. Son sectores que funcionan a modo de encrucijada o transmisor dentro de la red. Interpretación idéntica a la de los denominados efectos mediativos.

3.3.2. Efectos mediativos

La matriz M, planteada con anterioridad, se puede descomponer en el número de pasos desde un sector j a otro i, a través de otros intermedios:

Donde t_(j)ik es la ik- ésima celda de la matriz T en:

 Y A_(j) es la matriz resultante de eliminar la j-ésima fila y columna de la matriz A.

Los efectos mediativos indican la importancia de un sector j-ésimo como trasmisor o como punto de encrucijada para la conexión de la red económica:

Donde,

recoge la contribución de un sector j-ésimo en trasmitir los efectos intersectoriales de la rama  k.

El objetivo común de ambas técnicas consiste en cuantificar la relevancia de las ligazones intersectoriales de estas dos medidas presentadas, aunque el planteamiento matemático difiera notablemente. Sin embargo, los efectos mediativos permiten un análisis más completo que los coeficientes de Streit, ya que no sólo recogen las relaciones directas entre los diferentes sectores sino también las indirectas. Se trata, por tanto, de un indicador más rico sobre la intensidad de las transacciones totales. La consideración de los efectos inmediatos permitirá añadir además al estudio cuestiones sobre la rapidez de difusión de los efectos totales considerados, a través de la longitud media de las secuencias de sus transacciones económicas. Rasgos esenciales para profundizar en el conocimiento de los impactos de una política económica.

4. Análisis de caso: estudio estructural de la economía asturiana

La comparación de los resultados obtenidos al analizar las relaciones interindustriales de una determinada región o país, bajo la óptica de la teoría de las redes sociales y la aplicación de los métodos input-output clásicos, ofrece una visión práctica del grado de similitud de las técnicas planteadas.

En este trabajo, hemos desarrollado con esta finalidad, el estudio de la estructura económica asturiana a partir la matriz de Asturias correspondiente al 2000, por tratarse ésta de la última publicada[13], a un nivel de desagregación de 16 sectores. Además, hemos considerado los coeficientes totales, ya que así se tienen en cuenta tanto las relaciones interiores como los flujos de importación.

En la determinación de la relevancia de las transacciones intersectoriales, bien directas o indirectas, tradicionalmente los coeficientes de Rasmussen establecen una clasificación en cuatro categorías de los sectores analizados. En el caso de la economía asturiana los resultados son mostrados en el siguiente Cuadro:

Cuadro Nº1.  Coeficientes de Rasmussen

	I.    Sectores clave (4) (7) (8)	II. Sectores con arrastre hacia adelante (1) (2)
	III. Sectores con arrastre hacia atrás (3) (5) (6) (9) (10)	IV. Sectores independientes (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16)

Fuente: Elaboración propia a partir TIOA-2000.

Se denominan sectores claves de una economía a aquellos que presentan efectos de arrastre hacia delante y hacia atrás superiores a la media, entre ellos podemos señalar a los sectores Industria química (4), Industria transformadora de los metales (7) y Otras industrias manufactureras (8). Aquellas ramas que pueden ser consideradas como “impulsoras importantes de la economía regional” al gozar de fuertes efectos de arrastre hacia delante, son  Agricultura y pesca (1) e Industrias extractivas (2).  Sin embargo, las ramas Alimentación, bebidas y tabaco (3), Otros productos minerales no metálicos (5), Metalurgia y productos metálicos (6), Energía eléctrica, gas y agua (9) y Construcción (10), dados los elevados efectos de otros sectores sobre las mismas, pueden llegar a generar posibles estrangulamientos del sistema económico, lo que las sitúa como ramas estratégicas para el desarrollo económico. Y por último, los sectores que no se encuadran en ninguna de las tres categorías anteriores y que se denominan independientes, son sectores poco importantes dado que ni provocan efectos de arrastre en la economía, ni reaccionan de forma significativa ante variaciones de la demanda de los agentes considerados. Si consideramos la distribución porcentual de los sectores en las categorías consideradas, se puede apreciar que los sectores estratégicos representa un 31% del total, los impulsores un 13% y los claves un 19%, tal y como queda reflejado en el Gráfico Nº1. 

Gráfico Nº1.  Distribución sectorial

Fuente: Elaboración propia a partir de TIOA-2000.

La óptica aportada por la teoría de las redes sociales, permite estimar estos efectos totales de las relaciones intersectoriales directas e indirectas, a través de diversas medidas posicionales. El Cuadro Nº 2, expuesto a continuación, muestra lo resultados de este indicador junto con las otras dos medidas de centralidad desarrolladas por Friedkin (1990), los efectos inmediatos y los efectos mediativos:

Cuadro Nº2. Medidas de centralidad

	Efectos totales		Efectos inmediatos	Efectos mediativos
Sectores	CTEC(i)	CTEC(j)	CIEC(j)	CMEC(j)
1	0,032	0,029	0,013	0,322
2	0,017	0,089	0,082	0,630
3	0,076	0,015	0,009	0,254
4	0,017	0,081	0,062	0,582
5	0,013	0,022	0,018	0,343
6	0,161	0,065	0,044	0,505
7	0,054	0,068	0,050	0,538
8	0,023	0,063	0,040	0,497
9	0,028	0,049	0,040	0,497
10	0,206	0,073	0,053	0,549
11	0,048	0,042	0,040	0,501
12	0,058	0,009	0,008	0,235
13	0,040	0,077	0,062	0,577
14	0,110	0,307	0,126	0,671
15	0,079	0,002	0,002	0,063
16	0,037	0,010	0,009	0,236
Promedio	0,063	0,063	0,041	0,438

Fuente: Elaboración propia a partir de TIOA-2000.

Obsérvese que si se decide extrapolar la catalogación planteada por los coeficientes de Rasmussen, la distribución porcentual de la categorías -Gráfico Nº 1- se mantiene, si bien el reparto subyacente difiere notablemente.  La existencia de un factor corrector  de la capacidad de influencia intersectorial recogida a través de los coeficientes input-output, se muestra lógicamente como un elemento perturbador que permitiría recoger la sensibilidad de los sectores a la posición estructural desarrollada por los mismos, aspecto no considerado hasta ahora en este sentido en el análisis clásico input-output.

Si nos centramos en los efectos desarrollados por las ramas j-ésimas, los sectores clave bajo la perspectiva tradicional, esto es, Industria química (4), Industria transformadora de los metales (7) y Otras industrias manufactureras (8), presentan análogamente unos elevados efectos en  el conjunto de los tres indicadores analizados. Su posición de centralidad en la red económica, les permite trasmitir unos importantes efectos totales sobre el conjunto de la economía con relativa rapidez, jugando un papel clave en la intermediación de las relaciones intersectoriales del resto de agentes productivos. Estas características se extienden además básicamente al siguiente conjunto de ramas productivas: Industrias extractivas (2), Metalurgia y productos metálicos (6), Construcción (10), Transporte y comunicaciones (13) y Servicios financieros y empresariales (14). En contraposición, los sectores Comercio y reparación (11), Hostelería (12), Educación, sanidad y servicios sociales (15) y Otros servicios (16) –sectores independientes en el Cuadro Nº1-  poseen una posición menos central y por tanto, unos menores efectos posibles sobre la red económica configurada.

El principio de transmisión desarrollado a través del último de estos indicadores de centralidad considerados –efectos mediativos- constituye una cuestión clave para el desarrollo conjunto de una economía, compartida por los denominados coeficientes de Streit.

A partir del Cuadro Nº 3, se puede determinar una ordenación jerárquica de las actividades productivas en función de la intensidad de su acción polarizadora estimada a través de los mencionados coeficientes de Streit[14].

Cuadro Nº 3. Coeficiente de Ligazón Global

Sectores	CSGi
Agricultura y pesca (1)	0,904
Industrias extractivas (2)	0,942
Alimentación, bebidas y tabaco (3)	1,127
Industria química (4)	0,999
Otros productos minerales no metálicos (5)	0,727
Metalurgia y productos metálicos (6)	1,319
Industria transformadora de los metales (7)	0,982
Otras industrias manufactureras (8)	0,909
Energía eléctrica, gas y agua (9)	0,951
Construcción (10)	1,275
Comercio y reparación (11)	0,950
Hostelería (12)	0,769
Transporte y comunicaciones (13)	1,001
Servicios financieros y empresariales (14)	1,585
Educación, sanidad y servicios sociales (15)	0,842
Otros servicios (16)	0,718
Promedio	1

Fuente: Elaboración propia a partir de TIOA-2000.

Por encima del nivel medio, se sitúan Alimentación, bebidas y tabaco (3), Metalurgia y productos metálicos (6), Construcción (10), Transporte y comunicaciones (13) y Servicios financieros y empresariales (14), ramas que, a excepción de la primera, presentan análogamente efectos mediativos elevados. El resto de sectores con efectos trasmisores significativos, tales como Industrias extractivas (2), Industria química (4), Industria transformadora de los metales (7) y  Otras industrias manufactureras (8), se localizan muy próximas a este punto de corte medio.

De esta forma, con fundamentos y objetivos comparables a las técnicas clásicas, queda establecida empíricamente la similitud entre ambas metodologías, si bien la incorporación de los conceptos desarrollados bajo la teoría de las redes sociales permiten ampliar el espectro del estudio estructural desarrollado. La posible estimación de la ponderación a aplicar en la estimación de los efectos totales , la rapidez a través de la cual se difunden los efectos totales, y la inclusión de las relaciones indirectas en la estimación de la transmisión de los mismos, son aspectos no considerados en la concepción tradicional de la metodología input-output clásica, que resultan de interés en el universo económico planteado.

5. Conclusiones

El análisis de los rasgos estructurales de una economía es un aspecto fundamental para la comprensión de su funcionamiento. La teoría de las redes sociales muestra una gran potencialidad en este sentido, al permitir una notable simplificación del esquema de relaciones intersectoriales contenido en una tabla input-output. Su utilización posibilita un conocimiento en detalle de las relaciones de un sector con su entorno, en el cual desarrolla el entramado de sus estrategias empresariales con el resto de agentes económicos.

Un aspecto importante en los estudios económicos es el análisis estructural. Pretendemos que este documento sea el primer paso en la reformulación del análisis estructural input-output a partir de la teoría de las redes sociales y, para ello, proponemos una visión alternativa de los indicadores clásicos en el estudio de ramas clave en la economía. A partir de la óptica de las redes, la determinación de la posición de los sectores en la estructura económica a través de medidas de centralidad, establece la influencia e importancia de los mismos en la configuración de las transacciones bajo un nuevo enfoque enriquecedor.

Con fundamentos y objetivos comparables a las técnicas clásicas, la consideración de tres rasgos complementarios para su estimación- efectos totales, inmediatos y mediativos – aporta características esenciales que permiten profundizar en el conocimiento del funcionamiento interno de la estructura económica analizada.

Frente a la metodología clásica, surge una nueva óptica que constituye una ampliación del esquema de relaciones observable en una tabla input-ouput.  Si bien, los coeficientes clásicos de Rasmussen y los de Streit, se han empleado tradicionalmente para determinar, respectivamente, los sectores clave y las ramas fuertemente interrelacionadas, las medidas de centralidad muestran una capacidad superior para representar la realidad económica. No sólo aportan la rapidez de difusión de los efectos estimados, característica ausente en los indicadores tradicionales; además permiten una ponderación más exacta de las posibles influencias a través del coeficiente  en la expansión de los efectos totales, y la consideración de las relaciones indirectas, no incluidas en la estimación de los coeficientes de Streit, en la determinación de los sectores intensamente relacionados a través de los efectos mediativos.

6. Bibliografía

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[1] Enviar correspondencia a: Ana Salomé García Muñiz (asgarcia@correo.uniovi.es); Carmen Ramos Carvajal (cramos@correo.uniovi.es).

[2] Estos coeficientes clásicos han sido frecuentemente utilizados en numerosos estudios, así por ejemplo, podemos señalar los trabajos de Artís y otros (1993), López y Pulido (1993), Pérez y Martínez (1995) o Domínguez y Prado (2000), entre otros.

[3] Anteriormente existían ya aplicaciones sobre organización industrial y teoría de juegos a nivel de empresas individuales.

[4] Esta cita ha sido obtenida de la versión electrónica de Hanneman (2000): Introducción a los métodos de análisis de redes sociales, disponible en la dirección http://www.redes-sociales.net/ 

[5] Esta teoría explica como mecanismos informales de confianza y expectativas de comportamiento cooperativo surgen entre las relaciones empresariales y facilitan la transferencia de recursos entre agentes económicos (Uzzi, 2001).

[6]  Ver una introducción al concepto de capital social en Molina et.al. (2000b), la cual supone una adaptación del epígrafe existente, como cita el autor, en Molina (2000a).

[7] Otros conocidos índices de centralidad son la intermediación, la cercanía, lejanía y el índice de poder de Bonacich, por ejemplo.

[8] Una tabla input-output recoge las relaciones existentes entre los diferentes sectores, asimismo proporciona información sobre la demanda final y los inputs primarios de la economía. Dado que se trata de una matriz podemos aproximarnos a su estudio a partir de las filas o de las columnas. En el primer caso, es decir, si consideramos las filas, y partiendo del modelo simplificado de Leontief, podemos escribir:

X=AX+Y

donde X representa el vector de outputs totales, A corresponde a la matriz de coeficientes técnicos cuyos elementos se obtienen dividiendo los flujos intersectoriales entre los totales de las columnas e Y representa la demanda final.

Por lo tanto, operando se tiene que:

X=(I-A)^-1Y

[9] Los coeficientes de distribución se obtienen dividiendo los elementos de la matriz de flujos intersectoriales entre el total de cada fila.

[10] Esta matriz de efectos intersectoriales totales (V) cumple diversas propiedades entre las cuales podemos señalar que es una matriz estocástica por filas:

[11] Esta circunstancia se produce en aquellos casos en los cuales la matriz considerada es conexa y regular, es decir en términos de grafos o cadenas de Markov, sus elementos se encuentran relacionados bien directa o indirectamente y alguna de las potencias de la matriz presenta únicamente elementos positivos.

[12] Ver dicha formulación en Friedkin y Johnsen (1990).

[13] Para llevar a cabo este análisis utilizaremos la información recogida en la TIO de Asturias correspondiente al año 2000. Véase SADEI (2003, pendiente de publicación). Disponible electrónicamente en la página web de la Sociedad Asturiana de Estudios Económicos e Industriales  (www.sadei.es).

[14] Dado que los coeficientes de Streit se estiman como una media de proporciones relativas o, ligazones específicas, sin ponderación de ningún tipo, el coeficiente de ligazón global no debe interpretarse como una medida de la importancia cuantitativa de los complejos industriales, sino como un indicador cualitativo de su coherencia interna.