Capital Consumption Allowance (CCA)

Capital consumption allowance (CCA) is the amount of money a country has to spend each year to maintain its present level of economic production. The capital consumption allowance is calculated as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). The percentage of GDP that is not allocated to the CCA is called net domestic product and represents investment spending. CCA is also sometimes referred to as depreciation.

A capital consumption allowance that is too high a percentage of GDP indicates poor economic growth. This situation occurred in the United States during the Great Recession of 2008. Before the recession, investment spending was $889 billion. By 2009, it had declined 94 percent to $54 billion from its peak in 2006. Meanwhile, the CCA in 2009 was $1.46 trillion, or about 92 percent of GDP.

Capital goods refer to goods that help a producer create other consumer goods and services. For instance, if a pizza is a consumer good, the oven it came from is considered a capital good. Consumers don't buy pizza ovens, but they buy the pizzas it cooks as fast as they come out. Capital stock also includes heavy equipment used to make other types of things that consumers buy, such as cars, but it also includes smaller things like the computer a novelist uses to type out her next bestseller. 

All capital goods have what accountants call a useful life, or how long that capital good will be able to do its job to help a producer keep producing. The average pizza oven, for instance, has a useful life of about ten years. Every year that oven gets a lot of wear and tear, so it is worth less than the year before. As such, the pizza place owner will depreciate that oven over its useful life of baking pizzas.  Accounting depreciation marks down the value of that oven on the owners books every year until it has a value of $0 at the end of its useful life. 

The CCA measures how much the value of the stock of capital goods owned by a country declines in a given year. By measuring economic depreciation, which includes not only accounting depreciation, but also other reasons for declines in value, such as destruction or obsolescence.

A CCA will decline in a nation if enough of the underlying capital goods decline in value. Here are some of the reasons that such a decline might happen.

• Normal wear and tear
• Capital goods break down before they are supposed to and become unusable. They can be damaged or destroyed by fire or natural disasters like flooding. 
• Capital goods often become technologically obsolete. When the sewing machine was invented 150 years ago, all the old spinning jennys used to make clothing became obsolete.