A Study on Various Methods of Updating Supply and Use Tables and Their Applications for Iran

The most well-known application of the supply and use tables is the calculation of a variety of symmetric tables with different technological assumptions. From the 1960s to the late 2000s, only symmetric industry by industry tables under fixed sale commodity assumption, could be used as the basis of updating. However, a symmetric table cannot provide the simultaneous analysis of product and activity and, therefore, cannot be applied in any fields of economy. Since the late 2000s, the input-output analysts have developed various methods in order to directly use the supply and use tables as the basis of updating instead of updating the symmetric tables. Despite more than three decades of experience of compilation of the supply and use tables in Iran, statistical institutions still use the symmetric tables as the basis of updating. The present paper aims to quantitatively study and compare conventional methods of updating the supply and use tables with the view to answer the following question: Which of the reviewed methods best suits the available statistics in Iran and can be applied for the updating the supply and use tables? The results show that, among the methods under consideration, the SUT_RAS method is more consistent with the nature of data and statistics in Iran.