Measuring capital in the Netherlands

At Statistics Netherlands the development of productivity statistics is addressed as a key field of interest. The recent national accounts revision at Statistics Netherlands was taken as an opportunity to improve capital stock and depreciation statistics. The Perpetual Inventory Method, as now applied at Statistics Netherlands, provides in a consistent way statistics on depreciation, the net capital stock, the productive capital stock and capital services. Further, much attention has been given to estimating average service lives and discard patterns of different asset types based on direct capital stock observations in the manufacturing industry. This paper presents the main features of this new PIM system.