Abstract

Ghana case
What is measured actually included in the Ghana National Accounts estimates?
Coverage (mainly own-production of tangible assets such as machinery and equipment produced by manufacturing companies themselves for their own use; and construction works when companies build their own industrial buildings (offices, industrial complex or hotels) and households when they do major renovations on their houses or build houses by themselves).

Fixed Capital Formation in the Form of Construction Works
Buildings and structures as capital goods are the output of construction sector. This output is calculated by the sum of the value of material input for the construction of buildings and structures, and expenses on services and primary input (gross value added) of the sector. Included in construction materials are machineries and equipment directly installed in construction/building. To obtain the value of building materials at the location of construction activities, transport costs and trade margins are added. Construction material originating from domestic production consist of agricultural products, such as, bamboo and wood, mining and quarrying products, such as sand, stone, asphalt, etc.; and manufacturing product of construction materials. The construction materials from import are usually the products of manufacturing industry.

Fixed Capital Formation in the Form of Machinery, and Transport Equipment
Data on value of machinery, transport and equipment for fixed capital formation, originating either from import or domestic production are available annually from the import and manufacturing data.

Fixed Capital Formation in the Form of R & D
Currently, data on R & D is difficult to come by. During the rebasing of Ghana’s National Accounts, there was data which was used for the base year R&D.

Data Sources
The Ghanaian GFCF consist of the acquisition of new capital goods domestically produced, and new or second-hand capital goods imported from abroad. Capital goods are buildings and structure, and machinery, transport and equipment used in the process of production in the economy. The method applied to estimate GFCF of Ghana is commodity flow approach. This approach utilised the data on supply of goods (fixed assets) intended for capital formation. Data from manufacturing in establishment survey (IBES, living standard survey (GLSS) and External Trade statistics are the main sources of data for the measurement of GFCF.

This highlighted question on IBES is the one that you can use to produce an estimate of own capital production/formation of the enterprises by economic activities and measure it as % of GDP for the base year.

Future Improvements on Measuring Own Capital Production in Ghana
• Intellectual property products such as R&D and software products may be produced on own account and hence the need for the need for their inclusion will be very necessary.
• Regular data on firms that created/adapted their online programs and services to stay on the market as gathered during Covid pandemic captured through the Business Tracker Survey.
• Design of the surveys that can help to collect information on the own capital production
• Improvement of the coverage