SOAS Research Online

Abstract

As a step towards a rigorous study of capital formation in Iranian economy, this study is concerned with the detailed measurement of capital stock in the oil industry in Iran. The study is an empirical one in that it is based on the item-by-item examination of investment flows and presents disaggregated series of capital stock according to types of capital goods. The first two chapters comprise an attempt to put the study on the context of Iranian oil industry and to examine the framework of investment-decision-makings. Chapters three - five deal with the technical problems involved in defining, classifying, deflating and accounting for depreciation and obsolescence. Chapter six treats the problems in determining zero-year-stocks and presents both investment-flow and stocks-flow series in formats (92 Tables) which suggest structural and temporal composition of the stocks. The material thus provided, opens up new areas for investigation and analyses. And Chapter seven points at one such area of investigation by trying to explain the increased-output-per-unit of input, which is not explained by the availability of labour-per-unit-of-output and/or capital per-unit-of-output. The analysis establishes that capital has been deeply re-structured in favour of the more technology intensive infra-structural components. It also shows a constant technical bias in capital-labour substitution. Finally a technology index (A(t)) is constructed in order to determine the share-in-concrete-production of combined inputs of-zero-year-quality vis-a-vis that of modern technical embodiments.