 Fixed investment in economics refers to investment in fixed capital or to the replacement of depreciated fixed capital. Thus, fixed investment is investment in physical assets such as machinery, land, buildings, installations, vehicles, or technology. Normally, a company balance sheet will state both the amount of expenditure on fixed assets during the quarter or year, and the total value of the stock of fixed assets owned. Fixed investment contrasts with investments in labor, ongoing operating expenses, material or financial assets. Financial assets may also be held for a fixed term for example, bonds but they are not usually called fixed investment because they do not involve the purchase of physical fixed assets. The more usual term for such financial investments is fixed term investments. Bank deposits committed for a fixed term such as one or two years in a savings account are similarly called fixed term deposits. Statistical measures of fixed investment, such as provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis in the United States, Bureau of Staff in Europe, and other national and international statistical offices e.g. The International Monetary Fund are often considered by economists to be important indicators of longer term economic growth the growth of output and employment and potential productivity. The more fixed capital is used per worker, the more productive the worker can be, the other things being equal. For example, the worker who tilts the soil only with a spade is normally less productive than a worker who uses a tractor driven plow to do the same work, because with a tractor one can plow more land than less time, and thus produce more in less time, even if the tractor costs more than a spade. Obviously one would not normally use a tractor to plow a small garden, but in large scale farming the income earned using a tractor by far outweighs the expense of using a tractor. It is not economically to use a spade for large scale plowing, unless the labor is extremely cheap, and the supply of labor is plentiful. The level of fixed investment by businesses also indicates something about the level of confidence that business owners or managers have about the ability to earn more income from sales in the next few years. The reasoning is that they would be unlikely to tie up additional capital in fixed assets for several years or more, unless they thought it would be a commercially viable proposition in the longer term. If there is too much uncertainty about whether their fixed investment will pay off, they are unlikely to engage in it. In recent decades, the growth rate of fixed investment in the US, Europe and Japan was relatively low, but in China for example it is relatively high. Often the relatives are expressed as a ratio between gross fixed capital formation and GDP, or fixed investment per worker employed or per capita.