This paper tries to calculate some facts for the "knowledge economy". Building on the work of Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (CHS, 2005,9), using new data sets and a new micro survey, we (1) document UK intangible investment and (2) see how it contributes to economic growth. Regarding investment in knowledge/intangibles, we find (a) this is now greater than tangible investment at, in 2008, £141bn and £104bn respectively; (b) that R&D is about 11% of total intangible investment, software 15%, design 17%, and training and organizational capital 22%; (d) the most intangible-intensive industry is manufacturing (intangible investment is 20% of value added) and (e) treating intangible expenditure as investment raises market sector value added growth in the 1990s due to the ICT investment boom, but slightly reduces it in the 2000s. Regarding the contribution to growth, for 2000-08, (a) intangible capital deepening accounts for 23% of labour productivity growth, against computer hardware (12%) and TFP (40%); (b) adding intangibles to growth accounting lowers TFP growth by about 15% (c) capitalising R&D adds 0.03% to input growth and reduces ΔlnTFP by 0.03% and (d) manufacturing accounts for just over 40% of intangible capital deepening plus TFP.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.La serie de Documentos de Investigación del Banco de México divulga resultados preliminares de trabajos de investigación económica realizados en el Banco de México con la finalidad de propiciar el intercambio y debate de ideas. El contenido de los Documentos de Investigación, así como las conclusiones que de ellos se derivan, son responsabilidad exclusiva de los autores y no reflejan necesariamente las del Banco de México.The Working Papers series of Banco de México disseminates preliminary results of economic research conducted at Banco de México in order to promote the exchange and debate of ideas. The views and conclusions presented in the Working Papers are exclusively the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Banco de México.Abstract: Using data of households approaching retirement in the U.S., I find that the Whites' median saving rates are 9 percentage points larger than the Mexican Americans' rates (ethnic gap) and than the African Americans' rates (racial gap). Two-thirds of each gap correspond to changes in asset prices and a third to households' active decisions. Quantile decompositions show that differences in income and education explain most of the active saving gaps. This implies that wealth inequality is not attributable to differences in the distributions of active saving rates conditional on socio-economic characteristics. When retirement assets are included, the racial but not the ethnic gap in total savings disappears. The results suggest that reducing disparities in income, education and pension savings would help to reduce wealth inequality.Resumen: Usando datos de hogares cercanos al retiro en Estados Unidos, encuentro que las tasas de ahorro medianas de los Blancos son 9 puntos porcentuales mayores que las de los Mexicanoamericanos (brecha étnica) y Afroamericanos (brecha racial). Dos tercios de cada brecha corresponden a cambios en los precios de los activos y un tercio a decisiones activas de los hogares. Las descomposiciones por cuantiles muestran que diferencias en ingreso y educación explican gran parte de las brechas en ahorros activos. Esto implica que la desigualdad de la riqueza no es atribuible a diferencias en las distribuciones de las tasas de ahorro activas condicionales a características socio-económicas. Cuando se incluyen los ahorros para el retiro, la brecha racial en los ahorros totales desaparece, pero no la étnica. Los resultados sugieren que reducir las disparidades en ingreso, edu...

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An Innovation Index Based on Knowledge Capital Investment: Definition and Results for the UK Market Sector * We (a) propose an implementable innovation index, (b) relate it to existing innovation definitions and (c) show whole-economy and industry-specific results for the UK market sector, 2000-2005.Our innovation measure starts by observing that we could get more GDP without innovation by simply duplicating existing physical capital and labour (e.g. adding a second aircraft and crew on an existing route). Thus we propose to measure innovation as the additional GDP over and above the addition existing physical capital and labour. In our measure this is the contribution to GDP growth of market sector investment in knowledge (or intangible) capital. This contribution is measured from company spending on knowledge/intangible assets and TFP growth. We relate our measure to the literature on innovation definitions, TFP, creative industries and hidden innovation. We implement it for six UK market sector industries, 2000-2005, combining with output and tangible investment data from the EUKLEMS database. Our main findings are as follows. Over 2000-2005, market sector labour productivity grew at 2.74% per annum, of which the contribution of knowledge capital, our innovation measure, was 1.24% pa. In turn, manufacturing accounted for about 60% of this latter figure. If one includes increase in labour skill deepening (0.45% pa) as innovation, then innovation contributed 61% (=(1.24+0.45)/2.74)of labour productivity growth over the period.