Intangible Investment in Finland and Sweden in Survey and National Accounts Data

Mika Pajarinen

No 150, ETLA Working Papers from The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy

Abstract: Abstract We compare the structure of intangible investment in Finland and Sweden in 2015–2021 using two data sources: the EU KLEMS & INTANProd database, which builds on national accounts and complementary sources, and the European Investment Bank’s EIBIS enterprise survey. Intangible investment items that have a market transaction and an accounting counterpart – software and data, and in Finland also R&D – are fairly consistent across the two sources. By contrast, items that INTANProd derives from firms’ own labor input using the sum-of-costs method diverge strongly: the share of organizational capital in INTANProd is almost four times that in the survey, while for training the gap runs in the opposite direction. The shares of intangible investment, and the results of cross-country comparisons, thus depend materially on the measurement approach. These findings are supported by evidence on France and Germany (Nonnis, Roth & Bounfour, 2025a), where the largest discrepancies between sources are located in the same sum-of-costs items and where cross-country differences in organizational capital largely trace back to national practices in classifying managerial occupations. Our own calculations show that the share of employees classified as managers is roughly twice as high in Sweden as in Finland, so the same classification sensitivity also applies to the Finland–Sweden comparison.

Keywords: Intangible investment; Measurement; National accounts; Firm surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 E22 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2026-10-12
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