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The anatomy of capital stock : input-output material flow analysis (MFA) of the material composition of physical stocks and its evolution over time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2012

Y. Kondo
Affiliation:
Waseda University, Japan. e-mail: ykondo@waseda.jp; nakashin@waseda.jp
K. Nakajima
Affiliation:
National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan; e-mail: nakajima.kenichi@nies.go.jp
K. Matsubae
Affiliation:
Tohoku University, Japan; e-mail: matsubae@m.tohoku.ac.jp
S. Nakamura
Affiliation:
Waseda University, Japan. e-mail: ykondo@waseda.jp; nakashin@waseda.jp
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Abstract

The operation of an economy is supported by the stock of materials in the form of durables and infrastructure such as machinery, equipment, buildings, and structures. The amount of durables and infrastructure or “capital stock” in the economy is of great interest in the literature of economics, and is usually measured in monetary terms based on the data on capital expenditure. In spite of its wide use by economists, this measure of “capital stock” is of very limited use for sustainable management of material stock because of its neglect of physical properties such as the mass and material composition. This paper proposes a new method of measuring the stock of long-lived durables and infrastructure in terms of the mass of its materials. This method is based on the WIO-MFA method [S. Nakamura et al. J. Ind. Ecol. 11 (2007) 50-63] and the capital formation matrix that is one of the supplementary tables of the input-output table. The method is applied to the Japanese input-output data with 400 sectors, with 9 types of metals (iron, ferroalloy, copper, zinc, lead, tin, aluminum, silver, and gold) and 8 types of plastics (thermo-setting resins, PE (low), PE (high), PS, PP, PVC, high-performance resins, and other resins) occurring as materials. It was found that substantial variations exist among sectors while fixed capital formation in the year 2000 weighs 518 kg per million Japanese yen on average in metals and plastics.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© EDP Sciences 2012

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References

Nakamura, S., Nakajima, K., Mater. Trans. 46 (2005) 2550-2553
Nakamura, S., Nakajima, K., Kondo, Y., Nagasaka, T., J. Ind. Ecol. 11 (2007) 50-63
MIAC (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Government of Japan), 2000 Input-Output Tables for Japan, Tokyo : National Federation of Statistical Associations, 2004
Fukui, Y., Econometrica 54 (1986) 1425-1433
Nakamura, S., Kondo, Y., J. Ind. Ecol. 6 (2002) 39-63