$45 Billion of U.S. Private Investment Has Been Mislaid: Comment
评论Gordon关于私人投资被误置的研究，指出其统计估算存在缺陷，并质疑其理论框架，认为政府拥有但私人运营的资本不应计入私人资本存量。
Robert Gordon should be commended on a painstaking statistical effort, notwithstanding some serious flaws in his estimates. According to calculations made at the Office of Business Economics (OBE), the value of the investment which he calls mislaid is $76 billion rather than $45 billion. The OBE estimates of the investment types he discusses were published in a study by Robert Wasson, John Musgrave, and Claudia Harkins. However, I shall not deal here with statistical procedures. Rather, I shall examine the theoretical aspects of Gordon's article. As a preliminary, I should like to note that Gordon conveys the impression that he has discovered something of which no one before him was aware: that government owned, privately operated capital is omitted from the OBE estimates of private investment and private capital stocks. In fact, the omission of government owned, privately operated capital was discussed explicitly in 1956 in a basic OBE study devoted to manufacturing investment by Donald Wooden and Robert Wasson. OBE brought this study to Gordon's attention long before the publication of his article. All subsequent OBE publications on capital stocks have also made clear that they cover only privately owned stocks and exclude government owned capital. Moreover, Victor Perlo developed earlier many of the points featured by Gordon. If Gordon was nevertheless bent on creating the impression that he has made a discovery, he could with equal justification have staked out a broader claim. He could have discovered that government owned, government operated capital also is omitted from the OBE national accounting system, and he could have given his article an even more catchy title by calling it $768 Billion of U.S. Investment Has Been Mislaid, instead of settling for a measly $45 billion. But let us discuss Gordon's views on the definitional and conceptual problems underlying the measurement of capital. He writes as though his theoretical framework were obviously and unequivocally correct. In fact, however, he is dealing with difficult matters on which no agreement exists. To discuss these matters, it is necessary to distinguish between two components of capital which Gordon merges in his discussion. One is government surplus capital bought by the private sector; such capital belongs in the private capital stock and the question is how to value it. The other is government owned capital operated by the private sector; the question here is whether such capital belongs in the private capital stock at all. I shall argue that: 1) within the framework of the national accounting system used by OBE, government surplus capital is now properly valued in the OBE gross private investment series; 2) Gordon's valuation of government surplus capital as a component of the private gross capital stock is probably too high; 3) inclusion of government owned, privately operated capital in the private capital stock is inappropriate for production function analysis if OBE estimates of national product are used to measure output; and 4) that the where-used criterion proposed by Gordon for the classification of * Director of the Office of Business Economics of the U.S. Department of Commerce. He acknowledges the help received from Edward F. Denison and from his associates at the Office of Business Economics. However, they do not agree with all the points made in this paper.