The paper reports experience in constructing social accounting matrices (SAMs) for three national economies, viz. Iran, Sri Lanka and Swaziland. The SAMs focus particularly on the distribution of income through disaggregation of household sector income and outlay accounts consistent with more conventional disaggregation of production, factors, etc. The SAMs were conceived as an initial step towards understanding income distribution as an integral part of the development process and have been developed in parallel with work on planning models. Both the Iran and Sri Lanka SAMs were constructed within the context of the International Labour Office, World Employment Programme: that for Iran was intended as a contribution to the work of the Comprehensive Employment Strategy Mission to Iran under WEP auspices; while the Sri Lanka SAM was more specifically a research oriented study. The Swaziland study was financed by the Overseas Development Ministry, London as a research activity. Some learning‐by‐doing was involved in the sequence of SAMs and the problems encountered, solutions adopted and lessons learned provide the main substance of the paper.

This paper discusses the channels of impact of an extractives activity on an economy by presenting a brief description supported by graphics of the different routes through which the direct economic and social impacts of these activities might be enhanced. These routes include those that often have the highest political profile, namely spending of government revenues. But the paper also discusses other routes and channels that arguably are far more important, such as the direct effects of corporate spend in local supply chains; the immediate 'multiplier' effects of these; the further multipliers that follows from significant wage growth in these supply chains as well as in the main extractive activity; the new downstream activities that may be built on the primary extractive activity; and the externalities that can accrue from the direct boost to skills training that a large extractive investment is likely to provide.

Although the functional and institutional distributions of income are integrally connected to individual living standards and other development policy objectives, these dimensions are rarely given prominence or even accommodated within standard national accounting frameworks. This paper summarizes research on the estimation of a social accounting matrix (SAM) for Malaysia for 1970 in which the distribution of income between different factors and socio‐economic groups is identified. It is the latest of a series of case studies involving some of the authors and is, perhaps, the most detailed of its kind. The study departs from the United Nations SNA guidelines at various points. The SNA basically proposes a commodity balance approach to national income accounting. In giving equal emphasis to income/outlay accounts as to the production accounts, the present study has brought together data from two major primary sources: a household expenditure survey and a production survey. Their combination poses several problems which are discussed in the paper. It leads to an integrated picture, in matrix form, of the interrelationships between income distribution and production structure in the Malaysian economy. Both the factor and household accounts in our SAM are disaggregated according to race and the geographic distinction between Peninsular and East Malaysia, with an urban/rural split within Peninsula Malaysia. The Peninsula labor force is further disaggregated by education level, while its households are then subdivided according to the employment status of main income earners. Arguments for and against these choices are presented. Some other aspects of the study can be noted. First, the distinction drawn between East and Peninsular Malaysia is desirable not only because of the inherent interest of the regions but also because of large differences in data availability and hence in estimation methods. Secondly, to complete our SAM it was necessary to estimate inter‐household transfers, being the institutional analogue of inter‐industry commodity flow. And finally an attempt has been made to impute the labor component of unincorporated business income. These, then, are the major problems which had to be overcome in our attempt to quantify the generation, distribution, and redistribution of income within Malaysia in a SAM framework.

Brucker, Hastings, and Latham have provided an excellent summary of five input-output systems available on a commercial basis. These represent efforts to derive regional models (or at least regional, sectoral multipliers) from national tables. The authors assert that "the development of a well-organized market for regional input-output models has made changes in quantity and quality of regional input-output analyses that will be undertaken (emphasis added)." They do not, however, back up this obiter dictum with evidence.Leontief is quoted that: "The only way to improve (a regional model) is to go out and ask the local businesses what they buy and where they buy it." The authors imply that the availibility of "ready-made" systems is somehow a step in this direction, since it might "free the regional researchers to invest more time in acquiring data that more accurately reflect the unique characteristics of their regions." They fail to indicate, however, how this might be done.Actually, by quoting Leontief, Brucker et al. have moved the ancient debate about "top down" versus "bottom up" input-output tables back to square one, although the irony of this appears to have escaped them.

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