Changing the Treatment of Software Expenditures in the National Accounts

摘要

Statistics from the national economic accounts play an important role in economicforecasting, both for federal agencies and the private sector. One issue of recent concern has been whether the way those accounts treat businesses' spending on software makes current statistics misleading. This memorandum describes how an alternative treatment of software spending would affect the accounts and provides rough estimates of those effects. The analysis was undertaken as background research in support of the Congressional Budget Office's work on economic forecasting.