Intangible Investment of Finnish Businesses in 2004: An Experiment with Micro-level Data

This report studies various categories of intangible investment in tandem with micro-level data available for research purposes at Statistics Finland. Already at the firm level the amount of intangible investment exceeds that of tangible investment, and taking it into account changes our understanding of many key measures : for example the adjusted value added of the business sector is nearly ten per cent higher than the unadjusted one. R&D is roughly one-third of business sector intangible investment, but the share of software and in-house programming is almost as large. Investments in relation to advertising and marketing are also quite sizable. Categories of intangible investments are interrelated : for example internal R&D is not only related to external purchases of R&D inputs but also to employee training, software investment and programming, as well as advertising and marketing. The approach of this report, based on an extensive mass-imputation of the various missing firm-level values, seems like a promising avenue for further research.