Measuring the Income to Intangibles in Goods Production : A Global Value Chain Approach

Today’s production processes are fragmented across countries and industries. Intangibles play an important role, but their measurement is elusive. Their use is not bound by a location and they can be shared across plants. We propose a new empirical framework to measure factor incomes in production that spans industries and countries. We define intangible capital income residually as the difference between the value of a final product and the costs of all tangible factor inputs (capital and labour) in any stage of production. We bring this to the data using the WIOD and additional national account statistics on capital stocks. For manufactured products we find that the share of intangible capital income in final output increased rapidly since 2000, levelling off after 2008. In 2014 it stood at about 31 per cent. This is much higher than the tangible capital income share (18 per cent). For pharmaceuticals, furniture, textiles and food the intangible income share remained roughly constant over 2000-2014. In contrast the share increased rapidly for machinery and equipment products until 2008, slightly declining afterwards. We find that across all products about one quarter of the intangibles incomes is realised in the distribution stage (from factory to consumer). One quarter is realised in the final production stage and half in other production stages. The latter has increased in particular in the early 2000. We discuss measurement problems and stress the explorative nature of the exercise