Nesta Working Paper 12/09
Issued: July 2012
JEL Classification: O47, E22, E01
Keywords: innovation, productivity growth

Abstract

This paper provides an update of the NESTA Innovation Index and 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 34% greater than tangible investment, in 2009, £124.2bn and £92.7bn respectively; (b) that scientific R&D is about 11% of total intangible investment, software 18%, design 12%, and training and organizational capital 21% each; (d) the most intangible-intensive industry is manufacturing (intangible investment is 17% 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 has less impact on aggregate measures of growth in the 2000s.

Regarding the contribution to growth, for 2000-09, (a) intangible capital deepening accounts for 26% of labour productivity growth, against computer hardware and telecommunications equipment combined (16%) and TFP (-0.4%); (b) adding intangibles to growth accounting lowers TFP growth by about 18 percentage points (c) capitalising R&D adds 0.04% to input growth and reduces lnTFP by 0.02% and (d) manufacturing accounts for 47% of intangible capital deepening plus TFP.

Authors

Peter Goodridge, Jonathan Haskel, Gavin Wallis

The Nesta Working Paper Series is intended to make available early results of research undertaken or supported by Nesta and its partners in order to elicit comments and suggestions for revisions and to encourage discussion and further debate prior to publication (ISSN 2050-9820). The views expressed in this working paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of Nesta.