Abstract
Utilization efficiency has been defined as the ratio of the amount of industrial roundwood (or wood pulp) consumed in a country and year to the amount that would have been consumed to produce the same output with a reference technology. The reference technology was described by the average input–output relationships in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), from 1961 to 2005. The results showed that the efficiency of industrial roundwood utilization increased in most OECD countries from 1961 to 2005. There was also a strong decrease in the amount of wood pulp used for a given level of paper and paperboard production. Regression analysis with cross-sectional data suggested that the main determinant of the differences in efficiency of wood utilization between countries was the forest area per capita. The wood pulp price and population density were the main variables explaining the differences in wood pulp utilization between countries.
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Notes
The main reason for restricting the data to OECD countries was to avoid large errors, especially in the production statistics (Buongiorno et al. 2001).
Other reference technologies were explored, some based on pure time series, where the reference technology was defined by the data of a single country from 1961 to 2005, and others based on pure cross-sections, where the reference technology was defined by many countries in a single year. Both proved inferior to the pooling of time series and cross-sectional data in a panel, for the reasons stated here (see also Kando 2008).
Non OECD countries were also considered but discarded due to inaccurate data. In FAOSTAT, from 1961 to 1998, Belgium and Luxembourg were grouped as Belgium–Luxembourg, and from 1961 to 1991, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic were grouped as Czechoslovakia. Iceland is an OECD country, but it was not included because it did not make forest products. For the analysis of pulp utilization, Luxembourg was not included because it had no paper or paperboard production.
“Wood that has been produced from both domestic and imported roundwood” (FAO 2008c).
We assumed that the amount of veneer imported to make plywood was negligible. For example, in 2006 Japan imported 93,000 m3 of veneer, for all uses, while it produced 3,314,000 m3 of plywood (FAO 2008c).
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to this paper was supported in part by the USDA Forest Service Southern Forest Experiment Station and by the John N. McGovern Family scholarship.
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Kando, H., Buongiorno, J. Efficiency in wood and fiber utilization in OECD countries. J For Res 14, 321–327 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10310-009-0142-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10310-009-0142-8