O propósito geral deste estudo foi identificar quais fatores estariam limitando o do Vale do Tietê-Paraná. Os planos e projetos enfatizam o estoque de capital físico. Como a ênfase nesse estoque esgotou-se na literatura, as atenções voltaram-se para outras formas de capital. Diante disso, os objetivos específicos foram: (1) avaliar as alternativas propostas para os municípios do Vale do Tietê-Paraná expressas nos projetos e planos para a região; (2) analisar a importância dos estoques de capitais para o desenvolvimento dos municípios paulistas lindeiros aos rios Tietê-Paraná, e (3) verificar possíveis diferenças, entre os fatores determinantes do desenvolvimento, existente entre esses municípios e os outros municípios do Estado. Detectou-se, através do Método da Estrutura Lógica, inconsistência nos planos e projetos existentes para o Vale. Quanto aos estoques de capitais, este estudo utilizou a metodologia dos Componentes Principais para reduzir o número de variáveis levantadas inicialmente para representar os cinco estoques de capitais: natural, físico, financeiro, humano e social. A análise incluiu 625 municípios e criou-se uma variável dummy para diferenciar os lindeiros. Nove fatores são os representativos dos estoques de capitais e foram denominados: capital humano 1 (educação); capital físico; capital social 1 (associativismo); capital humano 2 (saúde); capital financeiro 1 (arrecadação); capital social 2 (desconfiança); capital natural 1 (terra); capital financeiro 2; capital natural 2 (depreciação).A percentagem da variância total explicada por cada um dos estoques foi: 19...

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Programa de Pós-Graduação da Faculdade de Educação, 2014.; Essa dissertação é um estudo sobre a intervenção do câmpus Planaltina do Instituto Federal de Brasília, por meio do Curso Técnico em Agropecuária com ênfase em Agroecologia, na realidade dos assentados da reforma agrária da região de Águas Emendadas. O trabalho teve como objetivo analisar em que medida existe influência do Curso Técnico em Agropecuária, ofertado pelo câmpus Planaltina, na formação do Capital Social com vistas ao desenvolvimento regional dos assentamentos da região de Águas Emendadas. Com base no estudo para identificar as ações dessa intervenção nos estoques de Capital Social dos participantes do curso, a dissertação indica o percurso histórico da educação profissional no Brasil e a dificuldade de encontrar indicadores para mensurar estoques de Capital Social. Para tal análise, esta pesquisa empregou uma metodologia combinada entre qualitativa e quantitativa. Na dimensão quantitativa, utilizou-se um survey com perguntas sobre comportamentos e atitudes para identificar os estoques de Capital Social nos participantes do curso. Em seguida, mediante entrevistas semiestruturadas...

Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. The authors randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and female-owned microenterprises in urban Ghana. Their findings cast doubt on the ability of capital alone to stimulate the growth of female microenterprises. First, while the average treatment effects of the in-kind grants are large and positive for both males and females, the gain in profits is almost zero for women with initial profits below the median, suggesting that capital alone is not enough to grow subsistence enterprises owned by women. Second, for women they strongly reject equality of the cash and in-kind grants; only in-kind grants lead to growth in business profits. The results for men also suggest a lower impact of cash, but differences between cash and in-kind grants are less robust. The difference in the effects of cash and in-kind grants is associated more with a lack of self-control than with external pressure. As a result...

Existing wealth estimates show that in most countries intangible capital is the largest share of total wealth. Intangible capital is calculated as the difference between total wealth and tangible (produced and natural) capital. This paper uses new estimates of total wealth, natural capital, and physical capital for a panel of countries to shed light on the constituents of the intangible capital residual. In a development-accounting framework, the authors show that factors of production are very successful in explaining the variation in output per worker when they use intangible capital instead of human capital as a factor of production. This suggests that intangible capital captures a broad range of assets typically included in the total factor productivity residual. Human capital is an important factor, both in statistical and economic terms, in regressions decomposing intangible capital.

The debate on whether natural disasters cause significant macroeconomic impacts and indeed hinder development is ongoing. Most analyses along these lines have focused on impacts on gross domestic product. This paper looks beyond this standard national accounting aggregate, and examines whether traditional and alternative national savings measures combined with adjustments for the destruction of capital stocks may contribute to better explaining post-disaster changes in welfare as measured by changes in consumption expenditure. The author concludes that including disaster asset losses may help to better explain variations in post-disaster consumption, albeit almost exclusively for the group of low-income countries. The observed effect is rather small and in the range of a few percent of the explained variation. For low-income countries, capital stock and changes therein, such as forced by disaster shocks, seem to play a more important role than for higher-income economies, where human capital and technological progress become crucial. There are important data constraints and uncertainties...

In spite of the growing concerns about foreign direct investment being diverted from Latin America to China and India, the best available data show that Latin America has performed relatively well since 1997. Foreign capital stocks from OECD countries and the United States in particular in China and India are still far from those in the largest Latin American economies. The evidence shows that foreign capital stocks in China increased more than in Latin America during 1990-1997, but not as much since 1997. In fact, Latin America has actually performed better than China since 1997 given its lack of relative growth. The growth of foreign capital stocks in India was more stable than in China. Nonetheless, after controlling for shocks emanating from the source countries and bilateral distance between source and host countries, this paper finds a significant change in foreign capital stocks relative to China between 1990 and 1997, but no change relative to India.

The authors provide various estimates of the government net capital stocks for a panel of 26 developing countries over the period 1970-2001. Two kinds of internationally comparable series of public capital stocks are presented. The first estimates are based on the standard perpetual inventory method and various assumptions regarding initial stocks and depreciation rates. The second set of estimates takes into account the potential inefficiency of public investments in creating capital with a nonparametric approach. Three estimates of net capital stocks are provided, on the basis of three assumptions regarding the efficiency of public investment.

Since income is the return on wealth, the total wealth of any given country should be on the order of 20 times its gross domestic product. Instead the average observed ratio from the balance sheet accounts of the System of National Accounts is a factor of 2.6 to 6.6, depending on whether natural resource stocks are included in the balance sheet. The clear implication is that the System of National Accounts wealth accounts are incomplete, with the most obvious omission being human capital. Estimating the value of human capital using the lifetime income approach for a sample of 13 (mostly high-income) countries yields a mean share of human capital in total wealth of 62 percent -- four times the value of produced capital and 15 times the value of natural capital. But for selected high-income countries in the sample there is still an average of 25 percent of total wealth that is unaccounted -- it is neither produced, nor natural, nor human capital. This residual intangible wealth is arguably the "stock equivalent" of total factor productivity -- the value of assets such as institutional quality and social capital that augment the capacity of produced...

Capital flows to developing countries are small and take mostly the form of loans rather than direct foreign investment. We build a simple model of North-South capital flows that highlights the interplay between diminishing returns, production risk and sovereign risk. This model generates a set of country portfolios and a world distribution of capital stocks that resemble those in the data.

Links between social capital, human capital, and product imitation are studied in an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth where the key benefit of social capital is to promote imitation. There is also a two-way interaction between imitation and human capital. Building social capital (which brings direct utility) requires time. Because life expectancy is endogenously related to human capital, time allocation between market work and social capital accumulation is also endogenously determined. Social capital accumulation depends also on access to infrastructure. The model is calibrated numerically for a low-income country. A policy that helps to promote social capital accumulation may be very effective to foster economic growth, even if it involves offsetting cuts in other productive components of government spending, such as education outlays or infrastructure investment. Offsetting cuts in infrastructure investment, however, may be less effective.

This paper uses a Ramsey model with two types of capital to analyze the optimal transition to clean capital when polluting investment is irreversible. The cost of climate mitigation decomposes as a technical cost of using clean instead of polluting capital and a transition cost from the irreversibility of pre-existing polluting capital. With a carbon price, the transition cost can be limited by underutilizing polluting capital, at the expense of a loss in the value of polluting assets (stranded assets) and a drop in income. In contrast, policy instruments that focus on redirecting investments -- such as feebates or environmental standards -- prevent underutilization of existing capital, avoid stranded assets, and reduce short-term losses; but they reduce emissions more slowly and increase the intertemporal cost of the transition. The paper investigates inter- and intra-generational distributional impacts and the political acceptability of climate change mitigation policy instruments.

To assess how capital stocks adapt to energy price changes, it is necessary to account for the impacts on different vintages of capital and to account separately for price-induced and autonomous improvements in the energy efficiency of capital stock. The results of econometric analysis for five manufacturing industries in 19 OECD countries between 1990 and 2005 indicate that higher energy prices resulted in smaller energy use due to both improved energy efficiency of capital stock and reduced demand for the energy input. The investment response to energy prices varied considerably across manufacturing industries, being more significant in energy-intensive sectors. The results of policy simulations indicate that a carbon tax can deliver significant reductions in energy consumption in the medium run with modest declines in energy-using capital stock.

Aging of populations and convergence between developed and developing countries in per capita incomes are shaping the evolution of saving, investment, capital flows, and, in particular, the cost of capital. When considering these trends, the existing literature argues for either continued, low interest rates, or sharply rising ones. This paper presents an alternative view: modest rises in interest rates, which result from a combination of increases in the global weight of high-saving developing economies (limiting declines in global saving), and decelerations in the rate of growth in developing countries (constraining upward pressure in global investment). For the majority of countries, slowing capital demand resulting from decelerating growth, coupled with structural changes that influence its attractiveness as a destination for capital, moderate increases in interest rates. Changes in key assumptions do not alter this view. More specifically, the small rise in interest rates persists even in a scenario where growth in developing countries decelerates more slowly...

This article sets flight capital in the context of portfolio choice, focusing on the proportion of private wealth that is held abroad. There are large regional differences in this proportion, ranging from 5 percent in South Asia to 40 percent in Africa. The authors explain cross-country differences in portfolio choice using variables that proxy differences in the risk-adjusted rate of return on capital. They apply the results to three policy issues: how the East Asian crisis affected domestic capital outflows; the effect of the International Monetary Fund-World Bank debt relief initiative for heavily indebted poor countries on capital repatriation; and why so much of Africa's private wealth is held outside the continent.

This paper offers an assessment of the methodologies employed to estimate the economic opportunity cost of capital for public sector projects, relying on the Mexican case for an applied empirical exercise. The traditional weighted cost of capital (top-down) approach used in the estimation of Mexico's economic opportunity cost of capital is reviewed and compared to the supply price (bottom-up) approach. With respect to previous studies using the top-down approach, this paper explores the contribution of domestic savings and expands the analysis to include a more detailed examination of the available macroeconomic, labor, financial, and tax information. The re-estimated top-down economic opportunity cost of capital for Mexico comes to 10.4 percent. To confirm these results and provide additional insights regarding the alternative bottom-up approach, the economic opportunity cost of capital is estimated using the supply price plus externalities method. For the case of Mexico, this paper recommends using a combination of estimation models (both the top-down and bottom-up approaches) to check the consistency of results and re-estimating the economic opportunity cost of capital every five years to accommodate for macroeconomic and fiscal changes. More broadly...

Capital is a fundamental component of agricultural production, and the accumulation of capital is key to growth in agriculture and the process of development. Unfortunately, cross-country data sets on agricultural fixed capital are rare. Using a common methodology that allows comparisons across countries, as well as over time, this paper introduces a data series on fixed capital in agriculture, based on national accounts data. The fixed capital measure differs remarkably from the Food and Agriculture Organization's data series on tractors, which has been widely utilized as a proxy for agricultural fixed capital. The authors construct comparable measures of capital in livestock and tree stock. They examine the evolution of the capital stocks from 1970 to 2000, paying particular attention to the changing composition of agricultural capital, as well as differences in the accumulation of capital for high-income and middle and lower-income countries. Using the capital measures in agricultural productivity analyses...

This paper explores the impact of the emergence of China and India on foreign capital stocks in other economies. Using bilateral data from 1990-2003 and drawing from the knowledge-capital model of the multinational enterprises to control for fundamental determinants of foreign capital stocks across countries, the evidence suggests that the impact of foreign capital in China and India on other countries' foreign capital stocks has been positive. This finding is robust to the use of ordinary least squares, Poisson, and negative binomial estimators; to the inclusion of time and country-pair fixed effects; to the inclusion of natural-resource endowments; and to the use of the sum of foreign capital stocks in Hong Kong (China) and mainland China instead of using only the latter's foreign capital stocks. There is surprisingly weak evidence of substitution in manufacturing foreign capital stocks away from Central America and Mexico in favor of China, and from the Southern Cone countries to India, but these findings are not robust to the use of alternative estimation techniques.

Consumer concerns regarding food safety and quality, a crippling farm crisis across North America, and growing criticisms of the environmental consequences of intensive agricultural practices are leading to increased scrutiny of the dominant, industrialized food system. Faced with uncertainty, many communities are pioneering new, decentralized models of food production, with a view to designing systems that are more economically, ecologically and socially sustainable. At their essence, these local food systems appear to embody a new form of ‘capitalism’, one that values, depends upon, and seeks to strengthen or preserve all stocks of community capital: natural, human, social, and economic. Employing a case study approach, this research explores ways in which a local food system’s development depends upon the interplay of a community’s capital stocks, as well as ways in which a local food system may serve as a site for the creation or strengthening of these capital stocks, with a particular focus on social capital. The two communities studied are: Kingston, Ontario and Hardwick, Vermont. Both communities have been actively pursuing local-food system development through various initiatives. Face-to-face interviews, participant observations...

Scaling relations, such as the IPAT equation and the Kaya identity, are useful for quickly gauging the scale of economic, technological, and demographic changes required to reduce environmental impacts and pressures; in the case of the Kaya identity, the environmental pressure is greenhouse gas emissions. However, when considering large-scale economic transformation, as with a shift to a low-carbon economy, the IPAT and Kaya identities and their cousins fail to capture the legacy of existing capital, on the one hand, and the need for new investment, on the other. While detailed models can capture these factors, they do not allow for rapid exploration of widely different alternatives, which is the appeal of the IPAT and Kaya identities. In this paper we present an extended Kaya identity that includes investment and capital stocks. The identity we propose is a sum of terms, rather than a simple scaling relation. Nevertheless, it allows for quick analysis and rapid exploration of a variety of different possible paths toward a low-carbon economy.; Comment: 7 figures

This paper presents annual estimates of fixed capital stocks and capital services for the United Kingdom, 1950-2013, for the whole economy and for the market sector. Our estimates cover eight asset types (structures, machinery, vehicles, computers, purchased software, own-account software, mineral exploration and artistic originals) and also a ninth, R&D, from 1981 to 2013. We compare the effect on the estimates of capital services of using either an exogenous (ex post) rate of return or an endogenous one. The latter uses a model which allows for ex ante risk: firms’ expectations may not be satisfied so the realised rate of return may not be equalised across assets. We see how much the inclusion of R&D matters. We also look at what has happened to capital intensity (capital services per hour worked) in the Great Recession, a period when labour productivity fell in the UK. And we consider the evolution of the aggregate depreciation rate and of capital consumption as a proportion of GDP.