Measuring Capital - OECD Manual 2009
Second edition
Capital - in particular of the physical sort - plays several roles in economic life: it constitutes wealth and it it provides services in production processes. Capital is invested, disinvested and it depreciates and becomes obsolescent and there is a question how to measure all these dimensions of capital in industry and national accounts. This revised Capital Manual is a comprehensive guide to the approaches toward capital measurement. It gives statisticians, researchers and analysts practical advice while providing theoretical background and an overview of the relevant literature. The manual comes in three parts - a first part with a non-technical description with the main concepts and steps involved in measuring capital; a second part directed at implementation and a third part outlining theory and a more complete mathematical formulation of the measurement process.
Depreciation or Consumption of Fixed Capital
Depreciation is the loss in value of an asset or a class of assets, as they age. Depreciation is a flow concept and as such shares key features such as principles of valuation with other flows in the national accounts. Economically, depreciation is best described as a deduction from income to account for the loss in capital value owing to the use of capital goods in production.1 The meaning of the value loss in production explains also why “Consumption of fixed capital” (CFC) has been used as a synonym for “Depreciation” in the 1993 SNA. Similarly, in the United States national accounts, the term “Capital consumption” has been employed.