Linkages, key sectors, and structural change: some new perspectives

There is general agreement about the importance of linkages among the sectors of any economy in the promulgation of economic growth stimuli, but little consensus about the ways in which "key sectors' can be identified. This paper places the debates into a broader context by revealing prespectives that enhance the rather narrow view of linkages that has become associated with key sector analysis. It only draws on a small set of these perspectives which adopt a hierarchy of micro, meso, and macro levels of economic analysis. Essentially, the focus will be on ways in which a meso-level perspective that describes the distribution of changes in direct coefficients on the whole economic system can be used to enhance the understanding and interpretation of key sectors. -from Authors