CAPITAL MAINTENANCE AND THE MEASUREMENT OF CORPORATE INCOME

John Walton

Review of Income and Wealth, 1981, vol. 27, issue 2, 109-135

Abstract: This paper considers the impact upon measures of corporate income of a number of concepts of the maintenance of the existing capital of an incorporated trading enterprise. A main distinction is drawn between the maintenance of all the assets employed in trading and the maintenance of the net assets attributable to the owners. Measures of income and of rates of return to capital depend on whether all the assets, or only the net assets attributable to the owners, are being considered. There are three sections of the paper after an introduction. Section 2 is conceptual and section 3 illustrates the concepts, with figures for U.K. manufacturing industry in 1975 to 1977, in which the figures in company balance sheets are adjusted from book values to estimated replacement cost, and estimates are made of depreciation at replacement cost and of the consumption of stock (inventories) at replacement cost. These figures follow the concept of maintaining physical assests. I have added calculations which extend the concept of capital maintenance to all operating or trading assets, including monetary working capital; and which then calculate the amounts necessary to maintain the assets attributable to the owners of a business. The three main methods are: to apply a gearing adjustment to abate the additional capital maintenance provisions for operating assets (which are realized revaluations by reference to their original cost); to take into income additionally the geared (or debt financed) portion of unrealized revaluations; and‐what is conceptually much the same thing‐to count as the charge for debt only real interest (which may be negative) rather than nominal interest. Section 4 considers some problems of aggregation, particularly the derivation of aggregates for the sectors of the economy, when based on figures for individual enterprises using the various approaches to capital maintenance.

Date: 1981
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