Have there been attempts to build complete maps of all economic relationships in a given economy?

External question — Economics Stack Exchange Author: Wintermute Original post: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/60137 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. I am curious about the history of "economic network mapping", specifically attempts at developing an accurate and complete understanding of the total sum of all relationships in a given economy. I recognize that this would be egregiously complex and perhaps impossible without access to private records, but the value that such data could provide for social science is self evident. An example of what I am looking for might be a study of a small town with few inflows/outflows, where most exchanges are happening between town residents and businesses also owned by residents, where you could track the complete life cycle of cash and credit as it flows through an economic network.

External answer — Economics Stack Exchange Author: emeryville Original post: https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/60138 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. There have been a few attempts in the past. François Quesnay , Bill Phillips , and Wassily Leontief (Nobel Laureate in 1973) can be seen as early pioneers in visualizing the structure of economic flows. Quesnay’s Tableau économique (1758) was one of the first attempts to map the circulation of income and production among different social classes—a precursor to modern input–output and network analyses. Bill Phillips is best known for his work on the Phillips curve, his development of economic analog computers (such as the MONIAC -- Monetary National Income Analogue Computer ) offered a tangible, dynamic representation of the circular flow of money, which also informs today's approaches to economic network mapping. Wassily Leontief's Input–Output Analysis (1930s–1950s) modeled economic sectors as nodes and tracked intersectoral flows of goods and services. From this foundation grew Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) in the 1960s and 1970s, adding detail on income distribution and institutional sectors (e.g., households, firms, government). More recently: Based on Leontief's work, the OECD Input-Output Tables (IOTs) describe the sale and purchase relationships between producers and consumers within an economy. See also this recent Working Paper (2023): Reconstructing firm-level input-output networks from partial information by Andrea Bacilieri and Pablo Austudillo-Estevez "There is a large consensus on the fundamental role of firm-level supply chain networks in macroeconomics. However, data on supply chains at the fine-grained, firm level are scarce and frequently incomplete. For listed firms, some commercial datasets exist but only contain information about the existence of a trade relationship between two companies, not the value of the monetary transaction. We use a recently developed maximum entropy method to reconstruct the values of the transactions based on information about their existence and aggregate information disclosed by firms in financial statements. We test the method on the administrative dataset of Ecuador and reconstruct a commercial dataset (FactSet). We test the method's performance on the weights, the technical and allocation coefficients (microscale quantities), two measures of firms' systemic importance and GDP volatility. The method reconstructs the distribution of microscale quantities reasonably well but shows diverging results for the measures of firms' systemic importance. Due to the network structure of supply chains and the sampling process of firms and links, quantities relying on the number of customers firms have (out-degrees) are harder to reconstruct. We also reconstruct the input-output table of globally listed firms and merge it with a global input-output table at the sector level (the WIOD). Differences in accounting standards between national accounts and firms' financial statements significantly reduce the quality of the reconstruction."