Summary: | Participants in the Special Meeting on National Accounts held in February 1980 requested the Secretariat to prepare a report on service lives of capital assets. Estimating service lives is one of the more difficult problems in using the perpetual inventory method to calculate capital stocks. While an earlier OECD report, The Measurement of Capital (40), had touched on the problem, participants agreed that this was an area where a more detailed study of country practices would be useful. A consultant, M. Pierre Teillet, was asked to conduct a survey of country practices and to prepare an initial report, which was briefly discussed at the Special Meeting on National Accounts held in June 1981. The present study, which has been prepared by the Economic Statistics and National Accounts Division of the ESD, draws both on the earlier work by M. Teillet and on the substantial quantity of reports, working papers and other documentation on capital stock estimates supplied by statistical ...
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