How Real Are Estimates of Corporate Investment?

The NAS estimates for private corporate investment based on RBI's studies of joint stock companies suffer from shrinking coverage, especially in the 1990s, leading to overestimates. Re-examining the official methodology, this study reports an alternative estimate. The results show that the level of re-estimated GFCF of the corporate sector had remained lower than that of NAS estimates. The trend between these two series has been diverging, more significantly since the mid-1990s. While the NAS series shows that the momentum of corporate investment has been sustained throughout the 1990s, the alternative estimates suggest that it had tapered off since the mid-1990s.