INVENTORY INVESTMENT IN CURRENT PRICES

Information on inventory stocks of industry, trade, and agricultural producers is available from several sources. In this appendix I describe my estimates of inventories and inventory investment during the period 1885 to 1913. Inventory stocks of railroads are included in the railroad capital stock and investment series in Appendix L.

A major source of data on inventories is that supplied by the balance sheets of corporations and mutual associations (aktsionernye i paevye organizatsii). In their annual reports, the aggregates of which were recorded in Ezhegodnik ministerstva finansov (section Aktsionernye obshchestva), corporate assets and liabilities were listed. Major assets were broken down into property (imushchestvo), meaning the value of buildings, land, and equipment, and stocks of materials (tovary i zapasy). The latter form the basis for my figures on industry and trade inventories.

The major obstacle to the use of these inventory figures is that they apply only to corporations, and in trade and agriculture corporations accounted for small shares of output. As relatively little information is available on the inventory holdings of noncorporate businesses, their stock-building behavior must be inferred from that of corporate producers. For this, I accept the methodology of S. G. Strumilin, who utilizes noncorporate output and profit data to infer noncorporate property and inventory values for industry and trade.

Basically, Strumilin's method for calculating inventories is to assume equivalent capital-output ratios and similar capital stock distributions between corporate and noncorporate producers.