physical capital

physical capital, in economics, a factor of production. It is one of three primary building blocks (along with land and labour) that, in combination, can be used to produce goods and services.

The term capital has no fixed conceptual definition, and various schools of economic thought have defined it differently. Physical capital is a subset of capital, and other subsets include financial capital (money), human capital, social capital, and knowledge capital. However, subdividing capital in that manner does not make physical capital a homogeneous substance, and both its definition and its measurement remain problematic.

Since the birth of capitalism and mechanized production, physical capital has been considered a stock of capital goods. Economic production functions, which model production processes by using factor inputs, assume that definition. National accounting statistics, however, subtly alter the definition to one of produced assets, which do not necessarily have to be factors of production. A country’s physical capital, or capital stock, consists of fixed capital assets. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has suggested that most countries use a derivation of the United Nations System of National Accounts to determine which sorts of goods to include in the fixed capital stock. According to the OECD, the goods to be included are durable (if lasting longer than one year), tangible (not patents and copyrights), fixed (mobile equipment is excluded, but inventories and work in progress are included), and reproducible (natural forests and land and mineral deposits are excluded). Such an approach provides a relatively clear definition, but it means, for example, that items such as housing stock and artistic originals may be included, in contradiction to the economic definition.

Both definitions of physical capital suffer from a problem of measurement. Experts have argued that a physical measure is impossible if different goods are considered physical capital, and a price or monetary measure invokes circular reasoning. That is because the theoretical price of a capital good is a measure of its total future profitability in current money. Yet profits are determined by the quantity of capital used in production; therefore, the quantity of capital cannot be determined by the amount of profit generated without circular reasoning. That is highly problematic for aggregate measures of physical capital as well as for economic theories that depend upon them as inputs. National statistics ignore the problem by using average historical purchasing prices to calculate quantity of capital. Price is treated as an exogenous variable, independent of future profitability and therefore quantity of capital. Textbook economic theories also ignore the problem when invoking aggregate production functions. More-radical approaches, utilizing institutional and evolutionary methods, reject the reduction of production to quantifiable factor inputs and therefore challenge not only the definition and measurement of physical capital but also the way the concept is deployed.

Economic Statistics and National Accounts Division of the Statistics Directorate, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (1992). Methods used by OECD countries to measure stocks of fixed capital. Paris: OECD.

Hodgson, G. M. (1994). Capital theory. In G. M. Hodgson, W. J. Samuels, & M. R. Tool (Eds.), The Elgar companion to institutional economics. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

Robinson, J. (1954). The production function and the theory of capital. Review of Economic Studies 21, 81–106. Reprinted in Collected economic papers of Joan Robinson (Vol. 2). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.