2003 Volume 2 Pages 111-144
With an increasing concern about environmental conservation and timber trade issues, results from quantitative analyses have been often provided at such a international meeting as WTO. The objective of this paper is to construct demand and supply functions for imports and exports of industrial logs, lumber, wood panel, chips and particles in Japan, Asian developing nations, North America, Central America, South America, Eastern and Western Europe, Oceania, Russia, and Africa. The derived functions can be used to develop a global timber trade model. The annual data from 1970 to 1999 are used for estimation. We utilize a log-linear model with such an estimation method as the least squares method (OLS), two stage least squares method (2SLS), and three stage least squares method (3SLS) as well as the Almon lag model in order to consider dynamics of economic environments. A non-stationary test is conducted for the data used. Our results show that if parameters estimated by OLS cannot satisfy a sign test, neither can the others. Estimates of supply functions for imports and exports in most cases are not satisfactory in this sense. Only when the amount of imports and exports is increasing or decreasing, the derived parameters show relatively price elastic phenomena.
