The Rents Problem in the Tableau Economique : Revisiting the Phillips Model

A number of efforts have been made so far to transcribe Francois Quesnay's Tableau Economique into a modern input-output framework. However, the transcriptions available at present have not been generally accepted. A point of serious discussion has been the fixed coefficients assumption, which dates back to the model proposed by Phillips in 1955. Especially regarding the analysis of rents formation and proprietors preferences, this assumption is at odds with basic physiocratic thought. In this paper a general solution is proposed to the problem of modelling the rents in an input-output context. The method suggests a general approach, where the physiocratic view is a special case that identifies productivity with only one sector.