An interesting paper examines the types of intellectual property products (IPP) capital employed by various sectors as measured in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The paper finds (not surprisingly) that investments in hard assets (e.g., plant and equipment) have decreased and have been replaced by investments in IPP. Also, there “still is a lot of heterogeneity in the types” of IP used among sectors, the paper says. For example, software capital is more prevalent in sectors such as information, finance and insurance, or management of companies than in sectors such as professional, scientific, and technical services, which continue to “invest heavily in the relatively more expensive R&D capital, as they had been doing since the 1980s,” the paper says. Consumer services and healthcare continue to be heavily invested in buildings (“expensive nonresidential structures”) but have also “increased their investments in a balanced mix of software and R&D capital but at much more modest levels compared to the rest of the capital-intensive sectors analyzed in this paper.” 

The paper, “Understanding the Uneven Growth of Intellectual Property Products Investment in the U.S.,” is by Dennis Fixler and Eva de Francisco, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and can be accessed if you click here.