The latest system of national accounts (SNA93) recommended that purchases of software (and any own-account production) should be capitalised as long as the acquisition satisfied conventional asset requirements. This change added about 1% to GDP in most OECD economies in the mid-1990s. However,...

This statistical working paper is the exact copy of the report of the joint OECD/Eurostat task force that was presented at the October 2002 OECD National Accounts Expert Meeting. The report confirms that current estimates of software investment differ significantly between countries for pure...