The Impact of Leased and Rented Assets on Industry Productivity Measurement - ARCHIVED

Leasing is an important means of gaining access to assets, of obtaining finance, and of reducing a lessee’s exposure to the risks inherent to asset ownership. A lease can be either a financial lease (capital lease) or an operating lease (capital rental). A financial lease is one where the legal owner of an asset (lessor) passes the economic ownership to the user of the asset (lessee), who then accepts the operating risks and receives the economic benefits from using the asset in a productive activity. Under an operating lease, the lessor is both the legal owner and the economic owner of the asset leased (rented), bearing the operating risks and receiving the economic benefits from the asset. The lessor transfers only the right to use the asset to the lessee.

Leasing offers firms the possibility to acquire the right to use capital assets under terms that differ from those prevailing through other financial instruments. The recording of leased assets in the Canadian System of National Accounts is ownership-based rather than user-based. The separation of capital ownership, in particular legal ownership, from the use of capital assets poses challenges to productivity measurement. To obtain consistent productivity measures at an industry level, leased and rented capital assets must be reallocated from owners’ accounts to users’ accounts. By using the General Index of Financial Information (GIFI) corporate balance sheets and detailed input-output tables, this paper tests the robustness of existing practices of data collection on leased and rented capital.