of Capital Inputs in Japanese Manufacturing

Students of the Japanese economy who use capital investment and stock statis-tics are blessed with riches that might arouse the envy of students of other countries. For manufacturing in particular, there are four plausible sources of gross investment data and at least two means of distributing total gross invest-ment among asset categories. Further, to provide measures of net capital stocks, a choice can be made between the use of the perpetual inventory method or an alternative approach utilizing net capital stock statistics from national wealth surveys as benchmarks. Because these alternatives yield dif-ferent results, however, the researcher may be more embarrassed than blessed by these riches. This paper examines the various data sources and methods available for measuring net capital stocks, by asset type, in Japanese manufacturing and assesses the merits of the alternatives, particularly from the viewpoint of their ultimate use in measuring multifactor productivity (MFP) growth. In pursuit of these objectives, we examine the differences in levels and growth rates of manufacturing gross investment and net capital stocks, by asset type, that result from using different Japanese data sources