Data issues for China become more problematic when capital input is in question. First
of all, China’s official statistics do not report capital stock estimates which satisfy
international national accounting standards. As a result, most researchers are led to derivate
their own capital stock series following different methods. Capital stock estimates are
extremely sensitive to the functional form of depreciation, choice of deflators, aggregation
level, capacity utilisation adjustments and contents of the investment data (inclusion of land,
inventories, residential buildings, etc.). Hence, it is hardly surprising that in the literature,
Chinese capital stock estimates exhibit, in many cases, seriously different patterns.