What are human investments? Can they be distinguished from consumption? Is it at all feasible to identify and measure them? What do they contribute to income? Granted that they seem amorphous compared to brick and mortar, and hard to get at compared to the investment accounts of corporations, they assuredly are not a fragment; they are rather like the contents of Pandora's box, full of difficulties and hope.

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The paper empirically examines the relative contribution of foreign and domestic machinery and equipment on manufacturing productivity in seven Asian economies. A Cobb-Douglas production function is used to test whether foreign machinery is more productive than domestic machinery. The study is based on a pooled cross-sectional time-series model, including seven countries - Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and India - for the years 1975 to 1990. The results support the hypothesis that a country's stage of development, skill-level of its labour force, and the technology embodied in capital play a crucial role in determining the relative impact of foreign and domestic capital on manufacturing productivity.

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