Doug:
> Jim:
> > But, as Dean Baker points out, measured depreciation
> > has sped up a lot.
>
> I'd thought so too, then I looked it up. Not much change since the late
> 70s/early 80s.
Here is a table I was able to put together from the World Bank web site a
while ago and it is for the year 2001. This table is about the decomposition
of GDP of the countries/regions mentioned below into the so-called
components by percentage value added by agriculture, goods and services:
Agriculture Goods Services
US 1.60 23.40 74.00
Canada 2.30 33.80 63.80
EU 2.50 29.00 68.50
Japan 1.40 32.20 66.40
China 16.40 50.20 33.40
India 24.60 26.60 48.80
Russia 6.40 37.90 55.70
EU
France 2.80 25.50 71.70
Italy 2.90 29.00 68.10
Germany 1.20 30.80 68.00
E. Asia/Pacific 16.10 47.50 36.40
World 3.90 29.50 66.60
I wonder what these percentages were in the periods from 1945 to 1968 to
1980s. If the service sector is less capital intensive as one would expect
and the percentage value added to the GDP by the service sector has gone up
over the past few decades, although the depreciation has sped up, the
consumption of fixed capital as percentage of the GDP might have remained
more or less constant over the years. Another interesting observation in the
table Doug sent is that the first quarter of 1975 appears to be when a
regime change started/occurred. If we bring our knowledge of the recent
history with this observation together, then, who knows, we may be able to
find some reasonable explanations.
Best,
Sabri
