Since Professor Leontief published his study of American foreign trade factor requirements in 1953, much has been written about the problem. This paper reviews the discussion briefly, and provides some data indicating the factor requirements for Canada's foreign trade.
This paper uses conventional input-output methods; one may criticise input-output results in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is to say that the algebraic solution does not represent the total picture. Professor Leontief, in a reply to Professor Granick and others, willingly admitted that the total picture includes resource endowments in each trading country, primary factors of production, shapes of production functions, input-output relations which govern the transformation of resources into goods and services, and consumer preferences for different bundles of production which can be supplied with alternative combinations of factor inputs. But in addition to this general limitation of the approach there are several specific criticisms.