This article investigates the nature and the salient features of international trade between Greece and her major trading partner Germany. The analysis inspired by the classical theory of value and distribution and using input–output data spanning the period 1995–2011 shows that the German economy possesses absolute cost advantage in its trade with Greece which gives rise to unequal exchange in the sense of transfers of labour values from Greece to Germany.

This article using the principal components analysis identifies key industries and groups them into particular clusters. The data come from the US benchmark input–output tables of the years 2002, 2007, 2012 and the most recently published input–output table of the year 2019. We observe some intertemporal switches of industries both between and within the top clusters. The findings further suggest that structural change is a slow-moving process and it takes time for some industries to move from one cluster to the other. This information may be proved important in the designation of effective economic policies by targeting key industries and also for the stability properties of the economic system.

This paper tests Bienenfeld's polynomial approximation of production prices using data from ten symmetric input–output tables of five European economies. The empirical results show that the quadratic formula works extremely well and the degree of its accuracy is connected to the actual distribution of the eigenvalues of the matrices of vertically integrated technical coefficients. It then follows that the number of vertically integrated industries that shape the production price–profit rate curves is rather low.

According to the popular Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade, a country is expected to export (import) those products whose production requires the intensive use of the factor of production that is in relative abundance (scarcity). Leontief (1953), using input–output data of the US economy for the year 1947, found that the US, an overwhelmingly capital-abundant country, exported labour-intensive products and imported capital-intensive ones. Clearly, the results contradicted the predictions of the Heckscher-Ohlin model and they were characterised as ‘Leontief’s paradox’. A number of explanations for the so-called paradox were offered and this paper briefly, but critically, evaluates these explanations as it examines whether or not Leontief’s results persist in the case of the US economy during the period 1998–2012.