Gross Capital Formation

Gross capital formation can be decomposed into the following parts: gross fixed capital formation and investment in inventories.

Gross fixed capital formation consists of the value of producers' acquisitions of new and existing non-financial assets less the value of their disposals of non-financial assets.

Investment in inventories—commonly referred to as the value of physical change in inventories or as changes in inventories in the international system—includes the following:

• Changes in stocks of outputs that are still being held by the units that produced them, prior to their being further processed, sold, delivered to other units or used in other ways.
• Changes in stocks of products acquired from other units that are intended to be used for intermediate consumption or for resale without further processing; they are measured by the value of the entries into inventories less the value of withdrawals, less the value of any recurrent losses of goods held in inventories.

The following set of tables include estimates of gross capital formation by institutional sector (business sector, general government sector) and by type of asset, such as machinery and equipment, residential structures, non-residential structure, engineering construction, inventories.