Measuring Intangible Capital Investment : An Application to the 'French Data'

Following Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005) this paper investigates French spending in intangible capital. In this work, we tackle two issues. First, working on national accounting data we sharply investigate the data sources, using detailed supply & use tables taken from the French national accounts. Second, referring to different fields in the economic literature, we deepen the analysis and the measurement methods that have been used recently in the empirical literature. We are then able to assess more accurately the items of interest. We estimate that French intangible GFCF could be valued for the whole economy between 8% and 9% of GDP in 2004 and between 6% and 7% for the business sector