Title: The structure of economic connections between industries: non-scaling behaviour

Authors: Camila C.S. Caiado; Paul Ormerod

Addresses: Department of Mathematical Sciences, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. ' Volterra Partners, 56-58 Putney High Street, London, SW15 1SF, UK

Abstract: There is considerable evidence of the existence of scaling behaviour (power law relationships) in a number of aspects of economic activity. Here, we examine the evidence on the connections between different industrial sectors, in terms of the value of output which each industry sells to each of the others, and the value of output which the others sell to it. Information on these connections between industries is available in the input-output tables in the national economic accounts. We analyse a database in which activity in the UK economy is disaggregated into 123 separate industries. We find that although the statistical distributions of the connections are highly non-Gaussian, there are marked departures from scaling behaviour, whether in the distribution of the connections from each individual industry to all the others, or in the distribution of connections from all industries into each individual one.

Keywords: power law; scaling behaviour; business cycle; industrial networks; UK economy; United Kingdom; industrial sectors.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCLM.2012.050396

International Journal of Complexity in Leadership and Management, 2012 Vol.2 No.1/2, pp.39 - 51

Published online: 27 Aug 2014 *