capital

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When sold or sent abroad in trade, goods become circulating capital and are exchanged for money. The money then becomes circulating capital, which finds its way back to the producing nations (represented as A, B, and C in this diagram) to pay for what they import.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

capital, in economics, a stock of resources that may be employed in the production of goods and services and the price paid for the use of credit or money, respectively.

Capital in economics is a word of many meanings. They all imply that capital is a “stock” by contrast with income, which is a “flow.” In its broadest possible sense, capital includes the human population; nonmaterial elements such as skills, abilities, and education; land, buildings, machines, equipment of all kinds; and all stocks of goods—finished or unfinished—in the hands of both firms and households.

In the business world the word capital usually refers to an item in the balance sheet representing that part of the net worth of an enterprise that has not been produced through the operations of the enterprise. In economics the word capital is generally confined to “real” as opposed to merely “financial” assets. Different as the two concepts may seem, they are not unrelated. If all balance sheets were consolidated in a closed economic system, all debts would be cancelled out because every debt is an asset in one balance sheet and a liability in another. What is left in the consolidated balance sheet, therefore, is a value of all the real assets of a society on one side and its total net worth on the other. This is the economist’s concept of capital.

A distinction may be made between goods in the hands of firms and goods in the hands of households, and attempts have been made to confine the term capital structure to the former. There is also a distinction between goods that have been produced and goods that are gifts of nature; attempts have been made to confine the term capital to the former, though the distinction is hard to maintain in practice. Another important distinction is between the stock of human beings (and their abilities) and the stock of nonhuman elements. In a slave society human beings are counted as capital in the same way as livestock or machines. In a free society each man is his own slave—the value of his body and mind is not, therefore, an article of commerce and does not get into the accounting system. In strict logic persons should continue to be regarded as part of the capital of a society; but in practice the distinction between the part of the total stock that enters into the accounting system, and the part that does not, is so important that it is not surprising that many writers have excluded persons from the capital stock.

Another distinction that has some historical importance is that between circulating and fixed capital. Fixed capital is usually defined as that which does not change its form in the course of the process of production, such as land, buildings, and machines. Circulating capital consists of goods in process, raw materials, and stocks of finished goods waiting to be sold; these goods must either be transformed, as when wheat is ground into flour, or they must change ownership, as when a stock of goods is sold. This distinction, like many others, is not always easy to maintain. Nevertheless, it represents a rough approach to an important problem of the relative structure of capital; that is, of the proportions in which goods of various kinds are found. The stock of real capital exhibits strong complementarities. A machine is of no use without a skilled operator and without raw materials for it to work on.

Although ancient and medieval writers were interested in the ethics of interest and usury, the concept of capital as such did not rise to prominence in economic thought before the classical economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Nassau Senior, and John Stuart Mill).

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Adam Smith, paste medallion by James Tassie, 1787; in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.

Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Adam Smith laid great stress on the role played by the accumulation of a stock of capital in facilitating the division of labour economics and in increasing the productivity of labour in general. He recognized clearly that accumulation proceeds from an excess of production over consumption. He distinguished between productive labour, which creates objects of capital, and unproductive labour (services), the fruits of which are enjoyed immediately. His thought was strongly coloured by observation of the annual agricultural cycle. The end of the harvest saw society with a given stock of grain. This stock was in the possession of the capitalists. A certain portion of it they reserved for their own consumption and for the consumption of their menial servants, the rest was used to feed “productive labourers” during the ensuing year. As a result, by the end of the next harvest the barns were full again and the stock had replaced itself, perhaps with something left over. The stock that the capitalists did not reserve for their own use was the “wages fund”—the more grain there was in the barn in October the sharper the competition of capitalists for workers, and the higher real wages would be in the year to come. The picture is a crude one, of course, and does not indicate the complexity of the relationship between stocks and flows in an industrial society. The last of the classical economists, John Stuart Mill, was forced to abandon the wages-fund theory. Nevertheless, the wages fund is a crude representation of some real but complex relationships, and the theory reappears in a more sophisticated form in later writers.

The classical economists distinguished three categories of income—wages, profit, and rent—and identified these with three factors of production—labour, capital, and land. David Ricardo especially made a sharp distinction between capital as “produced means of production,” and land as the “original and indestructible powers of the soil.” In modern economics this distinction has become blurred.