2005 Volume 4 Pages 147-173
A model of linear programming with variables which express the outputs of each sector of Japan and the US and with the objective function which consists of the sum of GDP including the total amount of the public benefits from forestry in each country is developed. Then the international pattern of the specialization which maximizes the objective function is investigated. First, the relation between the theory of comparative costs for two goods and two countries and the problem of linear programming is considered. Secondly, using this relation as a clue, the way how the multi-country, multicommodity problem of the comparative costs should be formulated concisely taking the intermediate goods into consideration as a problem of linear programming is developed. Then the coefficients of the objective function are modified in order to internalize these public benefits from forestry. Lastly, these problems of linear programming are constructed using the economic data on the 21 sectors (goods) in Japan and the US, and the desirable pattern of the international specialization of these countries is investigated. The conclusions may be summarized as follows: lf the amount of the public benefits from forestry in each country is estimated properly within a range of several hundred billion - several ten trillion (yen/year), respectively, it is beneficial under the properly estimated values that Japan replace its forest products import by the own production and the US suppress its output.
