R&D and Other Intangible Assets in an Input-Output Framework: Experimental Estimates with U.S. Data

The U.S., along with many other countries, plans to adjust official economic statistics in coming years to recognize R&D and several other intangibles as capital assets. We present here experimental estimates of the impact of capitalized intangibles on industry output and industry value added. We do this using the concepts of the 2008 System of National Accounts (SNA) for classifying intangible assets, along with the framework of the U.S. input-output (I-O) accounts. The intangibles we treat as assets are R&D expenditures, entertainment, literary, and artistic originals, and architectural and engineering design originals. R&D expenditures and
entertainment, literary, and artistic originals are explicitly identified as produced intangible assets. We argue that some architectural and engineering design originals, while not explicitly
identified as such in the SNA, fit within the SNA definition of produced assets.