Business investment: waiting for Godot?

Compared with the pre-crisis level of 2008, business investment has developed at a much slower pace than GDP. Last year enterprises invested EUR 370 billion in capital stock, or a mere 11.8 % of GDP, which was only marginally more than in 2009, the year of deep recession. In 2008 the investment-to-GDP ratio was still 13.3 %. In purely arithmetic terms, the decline of 1.5 percentage points represents an investment gap of some EUR 45 billion. So how concerned should we be about this?

Business investment: waiting for Godot?(PDF, 77 KB, non-accessible)