Capital Stocks, Capital Services and Multi-Factor Productivity Measures

Abstract

Capital services measures have long been recognised as the appropriate concept to capture capital input in production and productivity analysis. However, only few countries’ statistical agencies construct and publish such capital services measures. This paper describes capital services measures developed by OECD and presents estimation methods and results for the G7 countries. By way of example, the consequences of applying capital services measures instead of measures of gross or net capital stocks in the computation of rates of multi-factor productivity growth are examined for three countries, the United States, France and Australia ...