The contribution of intangible assets to sectoral productivity growth in the EU

In this paper, we report on new data on intangible investment at the level of one‐digit NACE industries of ten European Union (EU) countries. The data are constructed as a sectoral breakdown by using as control totals the INTAN‐Invest database, which contains measures of intangible investment at the level of the aggregate business sector. With the sectoral data, we assess the contribution of intangibles to productivity growth based on growth accounting and econometric estimation of production functions. The growth accounting contribution of intangibles to labor productivity growth is generally highest in manufacturing and finance. The estimated output elasticity of intangibles lies between 0.1 and 0.2, above factor shares but considerably below values found in previous research using aggregate data.