Measuring Intangible Capital: A Review of Current Practice

This paper examines international practices that measure firm-level investments into intangible capital. The issues motivating the paper are the need for a standardised framework for measuring intangible capital and the possibility for standardised applications of these measures into the future. The paper analyses the differences and problems associated with the properties of the “official” (accounting) and “non-official” measurement approaches. We propose that the way to a standardised, more comparable approach to measuring intangible capital is to employ a back-to-basics “costs” approach which classifies investments in intangible capital as assets based on management intent at the time.