About the criteria of output coincidence for forecasts to determine the orientation of the economy. Application for France, 1980-1997.

This note indicates that the method of output coincidence for forecasts used to determine if sectors are demand-driven or supply-driven in an input-output framework mixes two effects, the structural effect (choosing between demand and supply driven models) and the effect of an exogenous factor (final demand or added-value). The note recalls that another method is possible, the comparison of the stability of technical and allocation coefficients, generalized by the biproportional filter: if for a sector, after biproportional filtering, column coefficients are more stable than row coefficients, then this sector is declared as not supply-driven (but one cannot decide that it is demand-driven anyway), and conversely. Keywords :Input-Output ; Demand ; Supply ; Change ; RAS ; Biproportion.