Abstract
Suppressing increases in consumption of paper and paperboard can be an effective measure to reduce resource and energy consumption for developing countries. To accomplish that, we conducted cluster and discriminant analyses from 33 developed countries to identify socioeconomic factors that determine defferences between countries of low consumption of paper and paperboard and those of high consumption. The results show that higher levels of education, economic growth and urbanization are socioeconomic factors influencing consumption of paper and paperboard. A trade-off effect of reducing consumption could exist, however, among usage categories of newsprint, printing and writing paper, sanitary paper, and containerboard. Price increases of newsprint, sanitary paper, and containerboard would result in decreases in their consumption. Suppressing development of tertiary industry could reduce consumption of printing and writing paper, and sanitary paper.
