Measuring intangible capital and its contribution to economic growth in Europe

Bart van Ark (), Janet X. Hao, Carol Corrado and Charles Hulten
Additional contact information
Janet X. Hao: The Conference Board
Charles Hulten: The Conference Board

No 3/2009, EIB Papers from European Investment Bank, Economics Department

Abstract: This study describes the state of the art in the measurement of intangible capital and its contribution to economic growth, with a focus on an international comparison of intangible capital deepening among eleven advanced economies. By employing a broad measure of intangibles, including computerized information, innovative property and economic competencies, we find a relatively large impact on growth. Intangible capital explains about a quarter of labour-productivity in the US and larger countries of the EU. The continental West-European countries show a distinction between countries with significant contributions from intangible capital deepening and a group of laggards. Catching-up countries such as the Czech Republic, Greece and Slovakia show much larger contributions from tangible capital deepening than from intangibles, and also larger multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth rates related to the restructuring of those countries.

Keywords: Economic growth; productivity; capital; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2009-12-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-eff, nep-fdg and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (107)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.eib.org/attachments/efs/eibpapers/eibpa ... 4_n01_en.pdf#page=64 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:eibpap:2009_003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EIB Papers from European Investment Bank, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Polyxeni Kanelliadou ().