Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2024
ISSN
0034-6586
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Language
en-US
Abstract
Experts in the System of National Accounts (SNA) recently considered whether marketing could be included as a capital asset in the national accounts and later recommended that marketing should be an intangible in the 2025 SNA (IMF, 2022, 2023). This paper prepares macroeconomic measures of the United States marketing stock and develops similar measures within 61 industries. We find that, from 1987 to 2020, marketing capital contributed approximately as much to output growth (0.18 percentage point per year) as R&D (0.15) or software (0.19) did. Software grew more rapidly, but marketing had a larger factor share. Marketing contributes even more to output growth if quality is adjusted to allow for the better targeting associated with digital advertising. There is a close relationship between data flows, software, and digital marketing and national accountants will have to allocate expenditures among these categories.
Recommended Citation
Leo Sveikauskas, Rachel Soloveichik, Corby Garner, Peter B. Meyer, James Bessen & Matthew Russell,
Marketing, Other Intangibles, and Output Growth in 61 United States Industries
,
in
Review of Income and Wealth
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3966
Comments
Published 2024. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.