W HILE we can as yet do little to change the weather, we can nevertheless use weather variations to explain an occasional economic phenomenon. Considerable work has already been done on the connection between weather and the use of specific fuels in specific areas.' Recently, J. R. N. Stone and D. A. Rowe have related quarterly averages of temperature, rainfall, and sunshine to English consumption of fuel and light, entertainment, and beer.2 The present paper describes how year-to-year variations in winter temperatures seem to affect United States demand for all space-heating fuel combined. These temperature changes, it turns out, are of less importance than personal income in explaining the long-run trend in space-heat demand, though they are of considerable significance in explaining year-to-year variations. In general the demand equation obtained from I935-40, I946-Si data fits actual consumption well; the difference between actual and calculated consumption for I942-45 gives some notion of the relative unimportance of wartime fuel scarcity in the United States; and the predicted values for the years I952-59 differ from the actual values by an average of only i.6 per cent.

COUNTERCYCLICAL effects of public expenditures have received voluminous treatment in the economic literature of the past thirty years. There is one significant area, however, where improved data and analytical tools may provide new understanding. This is the area of public expenditure effects on employment and industrial output throughout the economy. The question of economy-wide effects was of considerable concern to early analysts of government work and relief programs. Early studies of these effects ordinarily began with a limited number of final materials and laboriously traced their production back through intermediate stages. In contrast to these earlier methods, input-output analysis, as introduced in Professor Leontief's The Structure of the American Economy in I94I, started with a comprehensive picture of the production relationships among all industries and provided a formal technique for tracing out economy-wide production and employment repercussions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics extended Leontief's empirical work into the postwar era, and in I952 published the results of a massive and detailed study of interindustry relationships for the year I947.' The present study uses the same interindustry data to investigate the employment effects of a variety of possible government spending programs. These include several types of public works, defense procurement (195I pattern), and general government spending at both the national and local levels. In most cases these spending patterns were those observed for the year I947, but some material for I954 was also available. Because government policies can also influence expenditures in other parts of the economy, the analysis has been extended to private house construction, all industrial construction, consumer spending (which may be increased through tax cuts, expanded government payrolls, or direct relief payments), and private capital investment. The analysis of these expenditure patterns, however, is of interest to countercyclical policy only to the extent that government policies actually do bring about the type of spending described. Finally, averages for all new construction (1947 pattern), all maintenance construction, and Professor Leontief's earlier results on foreign trade are included for comparison.