IMPACT OF FUEL SHORTAGES ON UNEMPLOYMENT AND PRODUCT.

The article presents a study on the impact of fuel shortages on unemployment and product in Israel. The ministries of Finance and Labour were interested in knowing the influence that a possible shortage of fuel oil would have on employment and production levels in the Israeli Economy. A Linear Programming model that maximizes Total Final Uses was designed. The most time consuming part of the research was to obtain the distribution of the fuels for the different branches. For this purpose tens of thousands of consumers listed on the fuel suppliers' sales records had to be classified according to the Israel Industrial Classification and then retranslated to the same 83 branches. Several bodies participated in the data collection, the Central Bureau of Statistics, The Central Bank of Israel, The Electric Corp. and the Ministry of Finance. The model, including 166 variables and 250 constraints, was run on a CDC 6400, using the APEX II package. Initial runs were carried out for the 1975 level of activity of the Israel economy and the results verified the model.