THE STOCK OF CAPITAL IN EUROPEAN-COMMUNITY AGRICULTURE

This paper presents estimates of capital stocks of buildings and machinery and transportation vehicles in European Community agriculture. The capital stocks are the cumulation of all past investments adjusted for discards of worn-out assets and loss of efficiency of assets over their service life. Asset discards are calculated based on an assumed mean service life for a group of assets and a distribution of actual discards around this mean service life. Efficiency loss is assumed to be a function of age. The function relating efficiency to age of the asset is approximated by a rectangular hyperbola concave to the origin. This rectangular hyperbola provides a general model incorporating several of the commonly used forms of depreciation as special cases.