Estimating Wood Utilization Accounts and Input-Output Relations from International Forest Product Statistics

Abstract

The objective of this study was to estimate wood and fiber utilization by product, and the corresponding input-output coefficients in countries where only the total input and output are known and where the production statistics missing or wrong. The method gives wood and fiber utilization accounts in close agreement with the reported statistics, and consistent with prior knowledge of consumption functions and of production technologies. The first step estimates the consumption of final products in countries that have obvious errors or no data. This estimation predicts consumption from GDP and population. The second step estimates for each country the input-output coefficients from raw material to product, while adjusting statistics on production, if necessary. A goal-programming model keeps the difference between the estimated and the official statistics as small as possible, while maintaining input-output coefficients within plausible bounds. The results give a full account of the wood and other fiber utilization in each country, together with input-output coefficients and measures of the conversion efficiency.

A longer version of this chapter was originally published in the Journal of Forest Economics 72(1):101–124.