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An industry creates a backward linkage when its demand enables an upstream industry to be established at the least minimum economic scale. The strength of an industry's backward linkages is to be measured by the probability that it will in fact push other industries over the threshold. Forward linkages are also defined by Hirschman as involving an interaction between scale and market size; in this case the definition is vaguer, but seems to involve the ability of an industry to reduce the costs of potential downstream users of its products and thus, again, push them over the threshold of profitability.