PRODUCTIVE HIGHWAY CAPITAL STOCK MEASURES

Recent advances in economic analysis of the relationship between highway capital stock
and economic performance provide important empirical assessments of the contribution of
our nation’s highways to economic growth. The focus of this project is to improve
measures of highway capital stock, and thus further refine economic analysis of the stock’s
contribution to economic growth.
This report summarizes project efforts. Chapter I describes the basis for productive
highway capital stock measures. Section I of Chapter I describes the methodology and
relevant capital stocks concepts. Section II describes existing highway and other public
capital stock studies and the methodologies employed. Chapter II details
recommendations for construction of a quality adjusted public capital stock. These
recommendations were presented to the project’s Select Advisory Committee (SAC) for
comments on December 10, 1997. Chapter III lists recommendations for future work.
These recommendations were presented to the SAC for comments on October 27, 1998.
Also at this meeting, methodologies employed in the construction of the highway capital
stocks were described, the Fraumeni highway capital stock series was presented, and
comparisons were made with other highway capital stock estimates. Finally, Chapter IV
details the construction of the stocks to facilitate updates by FHWA and the adoption of
relevant assumptions and methodologies by other researchers.