------	ECOREC is an economic research and consulting firm, providing support to the formulation and impact assessment of agricultural research, technology and innovation policies, and policies aimed at food security and poverty reduction. ECOREC offers consulting services in policy advice, research capacity development, and program monitoring and evaluation, to clients in the public, private and non-profit sectors. In its undertakings, ECOREC adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and applies quantitative research methods.		---------
------	To date, ECOREC has served for international organizations, donors and national governments, including the European Commission, UNDP, FAO, the World Bank, WHO, CGIAR, IFAD, IDRC, DFID, and economic, finance and agriculture ministries of the countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and European Union.		---------
------	Dr. Tugrul Temel, director of ECOREC, has substantial experience in applied policy research in economic development, particularly in the formulation of policies aimed at technological and institutional change, growth, poverty reduction and food security. He has carried out a large number of capacity building projects in the countries of Central and West Asia, the Caucasus, sub-Saharan Africa, and Middle East-North Africa. He has worked in academia, national and international organizations more than 20 years, widely published in journals and books, acted as editor in professional journals, and organized workshops for high-level policy makers.		---------
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------		A NEW PACKAGE FOR NETWORK ANALYSIS OF INPUT-OUTPUT SYSTEMS Here is an output from a newly developed Package to analyze backward and forward multipliers of an input-output (IO) matrix. The Algorithm developed by Dr. Temel generates the network resulting from targeting a specific sector at a threshold multiplier level. In the example left, the IO network of Argentina at a threshold level of 0.15 is generated for the wholesale sector. The Package retrieves IO matrices of 64 countries from OECD Input-Output Database. Now, with this Package, targeting a sector is so much easy and informative for the design of policy interventions.	---------
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------	Employment Strategies to Respond to COVID-19: Characterizing Input-Output Linkages of a Targeted Sector At present, the world is facing an unprecedented employment challenge due to the COVID-19 pandemic. ILO (2020) expects the largest amount of youth unemployment at the global level to take place in manufacturing, real estate, wholesale, and accommodation sectors. This paper aims to produce information for employment strategy development in China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany, Turkey, UK and USA, which together account for about 60 percent of the world GDP. A novel method is introduced to identify critical input-output backward and froward linkages of a targeted sector. Based on the linkages identified, sectoral dependencies and pathways of interactions in a production system are characterized to uncover critical information for the design of employment policy interventions. Manufacturing is found to be top priority sector to be targeted in all the eight countries, followed by real estate and wholesale sectors, and these sectors should be coupled with isolated communities of sectors to capture external employment effects.		-----------