RAS-ING THE TRANSACTIONS OR THE COEFFICIENTS: IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE

The biproportional RAS technique has become one of the most important tools to update, regionalize, or balance input-output tables. In this note, we rigorously prove that the estimation of the intermediate transactions matrix yields the same results as the estimation of the input coefficients matrix or the output coefficients matrix. We also show that this does not hold for any of the other updating procedures that have been commonly proposed as an alternative to RAS. Copyright (c) 2009, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.